Bookkeeping and the balance sheet

The first entry in this list is o balancete, and the last three letters carry the whole of its meaning. O balanço is the balance sheet; -ete is a diminutive suffix, the same one that makes o livrete out of o livro — the little booklet a car is registered in — and o rapazete out of o rapaz. An English reader who knows that much will read it as a small balance sheet and be wrong: a diminutive on a technical term rarely means small. It means lesser in standing. O balancete is the internal, provisional list of every account and its balance, drawn up month after month before o balanço is drawn up once a year; it is complete, it can run to many pages, and nothing about it is little. English has no suffix that will do this and reaches for an adjective instead — « trial » in « the trial balance », a word about testing rather than about size, and one nobody would arrive at from the Portuguese. So when a Portuguese document ends in -ete, ask whether the thing is smaller or merely not yet final.