Optics

The ninth entry is a ampliação, and it is the one word on this page an English reader is likely to get wrong at the first attempt, because the obvious rendering exists and means something else. « Amplification » in English belongs to sound and to argument. An amplifier makes a signal louder, a witness amplifies a statement by adding to it, a speaker amplifies a point that was made too briefly. It is never said of a picture. What the optician and the photographer mean here has two English names, and the distance between them is worth keeping. « Magnification » is the ratio, the bare number: a lens of ten times magnification, the magnification at which a crack becomes visible. « An enlargement » is a thing you can hold, the print made bigger, and it takes a plural — three enlargements, an enlargement on the wall. Portuguese does both jobs with one noun and feels no strain: a ampliação da imagem is the ratio, mandei fazer uma ampliação is the print. Ask whether a number or an object is meant, and the English word chooses itself.