Projects and management

One adjective in this list is a trap precisely because it exists in English too. Transversal is one of the commonest words in French working life: un projet transversal runs across several departments and belongs to none of them, une compétence transversale is one that travels from job to job, and un travail transversal is the phrase in this entry. The picture behind it is a line drawn across a set of parallel columns, and French uses it freely in ordinary prose. English inherited the same Latin transversus, laid crosswise, but shut the word up in mathematics: a « transversal » is the line that cuts a family of other lines, and outside a geometry lesson almost nobody reaches for it. Calling a project « transversal » in an English report therefore reads as translated French, and worse, as a technical term the writer has not defined. The everyday equivalents split by what is being described: « cross-departmental » for the organisation, « cross-functional » for the team, « cross-cutting » for the theme, and plain « across the business » wherever the sentence will take it.