Social work

La réunion de synthèse is the case conference on this list, and the noun inside it is one of the quietest traps on the page. In French, une réunion is simply a meeting: the weekly team meeting, the one with the housing office, the one that overruns. It is the ordinary word of working life, and se réunir is the ordinary verb for sitting down together — nous nous réunissons le mardi. The English « reunion » has narrowed to very nearly the opposite occasion: a gathering of people who have been apart for years, with photographs and name badges, as in « a family reunion » or « a school reunion ». So a word that is flat and administrative in one language is warm and rare in the other, and reading la réunion de synthèse as a reunion puts a case conference in quite the wrong room. The rule is worth holding in both directions. Render réunion as « meeting » unless something in the sentence says otherwise. And for the English sense French reaches for a different word altogether, les retrouvailles — a noun with no singular at all, which carries every ounce of the feeling the other one lacks.