Reinsurance

The first entry is la compagnia cedente, and the word that closes it is not an adjective but a present participle still doing participle work. Cedere yields cedente, the one that is ceding, and forms of this kind attach to a noun and agree with it as an adjective would: la parte contraente, la società richiedente, la compagnia cedente. English can copy that much, because « the ceding company » works the same way. What it cannot copy is the next step. Italian drops the noun, keeps the article, and the qualifier becomes the name of the party: la cedente, and in the plural le cedenti. The gender is inherited from the noun that has gone, which is why this one comes out feminine; where the party is a man or a person in general, a writer puts il cedente and nothing else moves. An English participle cannot be used this way at all, since « the ceding » names nobody, so the language falls back on frozen Latin participles kept for exactly such offices — « claimant », « applicant », « respondent » — and for this one it borrows outright: « the cedant ».