Organising the work

The eleventh entry is o retorno de experiência, and the Portuguese says plainly what the meeting is: the experience is carried back and handed round. English holds the same meeting and has never found a calm name for it. A British office says « a post-mortem » — the examination of a corpse — of a project that has just ended, often ended well, and nobody blinks. Beside it live « a wash-up », from the dishes done once the guests have gone; « a debrief », taken from the air force, where a crew is briefed before the flight and debriefed after it; and « lessons learned », a past participle frozen into a noun and printed at the head of a document. « A retrospective » is the only tidy one, and it belongs to software. So four worlds — the mortuary, the kitchen sink, the aerodrome and the classroom — share out the work of one Portuguese noun. In translating O retorno de experiência durou uma hora, the safe choice is « the review ». Everything more idiomatic drags in a picture, and it is seldom the one the writer meant.