Conservation of heritage

El soporte de la obra se mueve con la humedad: the support of the work moves with the moisture. Moisture there, humidity three lines further down, damp on a wall — English splits into three what Spanish holds in one noun, and the three do not stand in for one another. « Humidity » is water in the air, the thing a hygrometer reads and the thing la humedad relativa estable is about. « Moisture » is water inside a material — in wood, in canvas, in plaster — and it is moisture that makes a panel move. « Damp » is water where it has no business being: a damp wall, rising damp, the smell of a cellar. Spanish says la humedad for all three and lets the sentence carry the difference, so hay humedad en la sala is either a reading off an instrument or a complaint about the building, and only the rest of the paragraph will say which.