Welding

Halfway down sits la mancanza di fusione, lack of fusion, and the second noun is one an English reader will meet again and again in Italian without ever meeting the same word twice at home. La fusione is the melting of a metal: il punto di fusione is the melting point and il metallo fuso is molten metal. It is equally the casting of it, since la fusione in sabbia is sand casting and la fonderia is the foundry. It is « fusion » in the physicist’s sense, la fusione nucleare. And it is what two firms do when they become one, because la fusione tra due banche is a merger. English gives each of those four a word of its own and shares none of them, which is why a translation that reaches for « fusion » every time reads as nonsense in three cases out of four. What Italian keeps visible is the thread English lost: two things that were separate stop being separate, whether they are plates, atoms or balance sheets. Here it is the first sense, and the defect is that the two edges never became one.