Work and job applications

Twenty-ninth on this list is o estágio, and for an English reader it is the trap of the whole page, because it looks exactly like « stage » and never once means it. Fiz um estágio de três meses numa agência says: I did a three-month placement at an agency. O estágio is a spell of supervised work done in order to learn a job — what Britain calls a placement, an internship or a traineeship — and the person doing it is o estagiário. Every English sense of « stage » has to go somewhere else. A stage of a process is uma fase or uma etapa; the stage of a theatre is o palco; to stage a play is encenar, and to stage a protest is organizar. Nor is this an oddity of Portuguese: the French stage means exactly what o estágio means, so it is English that has gone its own way. The working rule is short enough to carry into a job advertisement: wherever a Portuguese text says estágio, somebody is learning a trade.