The goldsmith’s craft

The thirtieth entry is l’assicurazione del laboratorio, and the word in the middle is the one to handle carefully. Il laboratorio of a goldsmith is the workshop: the room with the bench, the torch, the drawplate and the polishing motor. In English « a laboratory » is a room built for science, with instruments and samples in it, and no broker would insure « the laboratory » of a jeweller without first asking what research goes on there. The plain renderings are « the workshop » and, for a one-person business, « the bench ». The trap is sharper on this page than anywhere else, because the same list carries il certificato gemmologico, and that certificate really does come out of a laboratory in the English sense, with a spectrometer and a microscope in it. So one English word covers one of the two rooms and not the other: il laboratorio orafo is the goldsmith’s workshop, il laboratorio gemmologico is the laboratory, and a policy translated word for word insures the wrong room.