Human resources

The ninth entry is o fim do período experimental, and the adjective in the middle is the one an English reader should on no account carry straight across. « Experimental » in English belongs to laboratories and to art: an experimental drug, an experimental film, an experimental method. Set it beside a job and it sounds as though the employer were trying something out on a person. Portuguese uses the word in its older and wider sense — by way of trial, on trial — and the labour code made it the technical name for the opening stretch of any contract, the weeks in which either side may walk away with little or no notice. English calls that « probation », or « the probationary period », a word from a different root altogether and one that no English speaker hears as scientific. Two things follow for reading. Estar à experiência says that somebody is in those opening weeks of a job, with the decision still open on both sides. And « probation » has a second life of its own, the one the courts hand out, which Portuguese never puts anywhere near a contract of employment.