John:
What is says is for Xlate not to be your friend. The default action is to expand any date timestamp fields to the full 24 bytes as outlined in the HL7 standard.
If you set precision off in the DATECOPYOPT it tells Xlate to leave those fields alone. In other words, what comes in is what you get.
It will apply to any field or sub-field after the DATECOPYOPT. You can turn it on and off by simply adding more DATECOPYOPT statements. It will change anything after the statement.
Hope this makes sense.
FWIW, since more people want precision off than want it on, in Cloverleaf 5.5 it can default to off saving you from having to put a DATECOPYOPT at the top of every translate.