Japanese newspapers, which make heavy use of such abbreviations, are a good place to practice swimming in that sea. The spectrum of katakana abbreviations the translator is likely to encounter is far beyond the scope of a single paper, and probably much too volatile to allow coverage in any written medium that purports to retain much of its value more than a year or so. Translators working from published works will have less need to worry about this device, which can be extremely nasty if you do not have access to the author or other Japanese familiar with the field. Even if a particular manuscript includes no drawings, the author could very well make use of drawing abbreviations in a way that could cause severe translator stress. Most times the symbols are completely useless in the English target text and must be spelled out or explained.
Some common examples are as follows.
3.5.1 Mechanical Drawings Japanese authors routinely use mechanical drawing abbreviations in places in which a NEWT should use the full form of the word or concept being represented. A Japanese author can sometimes fool an unwary translator into thinking that the circuit diagram symbols they use in text are actually usable in English in the sense of the property possessed by the components to which they refer. They are, in fact, almost never usable in English to replace the words for which the Japanese are using them as replacements. These are often seen in Japanese sentences where their use in English would not be allowable. SW used to replace switch in text.