Lost - and found - in translation

Nothing terribly interesting happened today (except for this morning - we went to a theatre and got a behind-the-scenes tour of the whole building! Made me miss doing plays.), so instead of relating the particulars of the day (boring) I thought I would instead talk a little bit about weird translations/things that just don't translate into French. I think it's pretty interesting stuff.

In French, "plein(e)" means "full," but one must never say "Je suis plein(e)" to mean "I'm full" after eating a meal, since in French it translates as "I'm pregnant" or "I'm sexually satisfied." Talk about awkward dinner convos. (Instead, one can say "J'ai assez mangé," which means "I've eaten enough.")

The verb "visiter" means "to visit," but it can only apply to places, not people. If one "visits" a person in French, things suddenly become a lot less PG, if you get what I'm saying.

If you try to translate the adjective "excited" from English to French, you might end up with the French adjective "excité(e)." Don't use it. Unless, you know, you wanted to tell the world that you're sexually aroused.

It may look like it means "preservatives" (and some translators will translate it as such), but don't be fooled - the French word "préservatifs" actually means "condoms." True story.

There's no French word for "anticlimactic." I found this out at dinner the other night, when I was talking with ma famille about Hitchcock films and I mentioned The Birds. Ma mère loves it, but I don't; "Je n'aime pas le fin du film," I said. "C'est...comment dit-on 'anticlimactic'?" (Translation: "I don't like the end of the movie. It's...how does one say 'anticlimactic'?") We were all stumped. But eventually mon père said (in French), "Oh, I understand what you're saying. In France, we say 'il finis comme la queue du poisson' - 'it ends like a fish tail.'" I looked it up later, and sure enough, "finir comme la queue du poisson" is pretty much the only way to say "anticlimactic" in French; the dictionary translates it as "décevant" ("disappointing"), which is not quite the same thing.

Bizarrely enough, the phrase "to fishtail," as in "I hit a patch of ice while driving and fishtailed across three lanes of traffic" exists in France as well as English. Sure, "I'm full" or "I'm excited" don't work, but "I fishtailed" does. Go figure.