Journalism and research

Two thirds of the way down this list stands il sommario, and the English word it looks like is the one thing it never means here. In an Italian paper il sommario is the block of type set between the headline and the first line of the article, the two or three lines that say what the piece is going to show — what a British newsroom calls « the standfirst », and what nobody in it has ever called a « summary ». The trap is that « summary » is a perfectly good rendering of the other sommario, the one that is an adjective. Un giudizio sommario is a summary judgement, una descrizione sommaria is a cursory description, and there the two languages agree down to the ending. So the same word is a technical noun on a page of newsprint and a rather dismissive adjective everywhere else, and only the article in front of it says which of the two has turned up. A third job waits in a magazine, where il sommario is the contents page. Translate it as « summary » and the reader is told that the article has been boiled down, when it has merely been introduced.