Museology

The second entry is la radiation de l’inventaire, and the first noun sends an English reader in exactly the wrong direction. In English, « radiation » belongs to physics and medicine and goes nowhere else: it is rays, particles, what a source emits. French has that sense too, but it is not the everyday one. The ordinary la radiation is an administrative act, a name struck off a register. La radiation des listes électorales removes a voter, la radiation d’un avocat du barreau ends a career, la radiation d’un médecin de l’Ordre is the heaviest sentence a professional body can pass, and la radiation d’une dette takes it off the books. The verb behind them is radier, and être radié means struck off, never irradiated. Where rays are meant, French reaches by preference for le rayonnement — le rayonnement solaire, les rayonnements ionisants. So this entry is an object taken out of the register, which English calls deaccessioning, and « the radiation of the inventory » would say nothing at all.