Music production

The twenty-second entry is a entrada em gravação, and English names it « the punch-in »: the engineer drops into record in the middle of a bar and drops out again a few notes later. The verb is worth following, because « to punch in » is already taken by something almost everybody does. In a factory or an office it is what you do to the time clock on arriving — you punch in at eight and punch out at five — and that is the sense a reader will meet first anywhere outside this page. Around the two sits a large family that has left the fist behind altogether. « A punch-up » is a brawl, and nothing in it is punched upwards. « To punch above one’s weight » is to achieve more than your size promises, and it comes straight out of the boxing ring. « To pull one’s punches » is to hold back on purpose, and it lives mostly in the negative, so a report that pulls no punches spares nobody. Perfurar and o murro carry none of this, which means each of those phrases has to be rebuilt in Portuguese rather than translated.