Translatable but Debatable
להפעיל

In a sentence dear to freelance translators, Leviticus says: לא־תלין פעלת שכיר אתך עד־בקר, the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning.  Aside from that sentence, the Five Books of Moses seem to confine the significance of the letter-sequence פעל to the works of the Deity.  Later in the Bible, it applies to the deeds of heroes and even of everyday people, and today of course the modern-day פועל is the simplest of laborers.

The פועל may be employed by a מפעל, which is usually translated easily enough as something like a plant or factory, or in the abstract sense as something like an enterprise or project.  There can be a problem when the translator isn’t sure whether the particular physical facility or the overall endeavor is meant (“Our colleague Naomileh has been a great contributor to מפעלנו”) or when the Hebrew original has not given any thought to the distinction.

The job of the פועל may in turn be to run or operate — להפעיל — some machine.  But what about the person whose task involves the הפעלה of other people?  In a real-life example, I encountered a written procedure in which a man’s duties included הפעלת הרכש as necessary.  He is not a manager of purchasing department personnel; if he were, I guess you could say he deploys them.  But while not their manager, he still has responsibility for seeing that they understand what his project requires and do it.  You can run a department, but you can’t run a person, or someone else’s department, although in the spy movies you can run a secret agent in someone else’s country.  And even if we consider that we may translate הרכש as the operation rather than as the department, the outsider is not shoving the department head aside to personally run or manage that operation. 

I found that הפעיל is not in my older pocket dictionaries except as a grammatical term.  Dov Ben Abba’s pocket dictionary (for Signet) lists activate, start, set in motion, operate.  On line, Babylon says activate, set in motion, actuate, operate and Morfix goes to town with to activate, to turn on (engine, instrument); to encourage, to stimulate; to instigate, to initiate; to run (company, organization); to apply, to use; to set off (explosive device); to operate, to control (spy).  Because I imagine the outsider who tells the purchasing department what his project needs is also going to be backseat-driving them, not merely setting them in motion, I think that the best word there might be direct.

If you’d like to go off topic to some different word, please write me at and maybe your idea will appear (with credit, of course) in a future column.