Negotiation

La palanca menos evidente suele ser el plazo: the least obvious lever is usually the deadline. English borrowed the metaphor and then split it in two — the lever is the bar you push, leverage is what it gets you — where Spanish keeps la palanca for both. And there is a third sense English handles with a different image altogether: tener palanca is to have somebody on the inside, the friend who gets your file moved to the top of the pile. English says pull, or strings, or knowing somebody — a rope, not a bar. So entró por palanca says somebody got the job through a contact, and nothing whatever about machinery.