Wastewater treatment

The thirtieth entry is l’abitante equivalente, the unit a works is sized in, and the noun inside it sits quite differently in the two languages. In Italian, l’abitante is an ordinary word that anybody may use on an ordinary day: un paese di duemila abitanti, gli abitanti del quartiere, quanti abitanti ha Bologna?. It carries no ceremony whatever. « Inhabitant » is the exact cognate, and it is not an ordinary word for us at all: it belongs to gazetteers, census tables, treaties and the labels under museum cases, and somebody who says « the inhabitants of my street » has said something faintly comic. We reach instead for « people », « residents » or « population » — « a town of two thousand people », « residents have complained about the smell ». Which is why the unit itself is « the population equivalent » in English and never « the inhabitant equivalent », although the Italian, the French and the German all count in inhabitants. Our word is not wrong; it is simply kept for the register in which numbers get printed.