Parental leave and family at work in Portuguese

The sixteenth entry is o período de adaptação, and an English reader who takes it word for word produces a phrase no British nursery has ever used. « Adaptation » has been captured by two trades. In the arts it is what happens to a novel on its way to a screen, so an adaptation is a script rather than a process anybody lives through. In biology it is what a species does over millennia, which puts « adaptation to cold » in a lecture on evolution. Neither leaves room for a two-year-old spending a fortnight getting used to a room full of strangers. For that English reaches for a phrasal verb: the child is « settling in », and the form asks about the « settling-in period », hyphen and all. Portuguese keeps the Latin word for the whole range, because adaptar-se is what a person does to a new school, a new town or a new shift, with no suggestion of evolution and none of rewriting. The error is quiet rather than loud: « the adaptation period » will be understood, and it will read like a document translated from somewhere else.