Tetchy Turtle

Lately I (really "we") have been simultaneously revising and translating my projet de thèse (thesis proposal). My written academic French is pretty poor (it's the combination of different syntax and grammatical structures and different ideas about how one should write an academic paper), so I'm pretty reliant on Virginia and some friends (Marie, Jean-Julien, Elisabeth), plus my director. But sometimes no one is within reach and I have to rely on other sources, like Wikipedia.

One of the poems I've written about includes a scene involving a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina), which I translated, thanks to the above-mentioned source, as "tortue hargneuse"--a phrase that my director, M. Aquien, thought was hilarious. Turns out that a tortue "hargneuse" is any or all of the following things:

scowling
scathing
shrewish
tetchy
bitchy

Apparently, though, it's the real French name for the creature.

On French Words and Their English Cousins

Translation, I'm learning, is a funny art. It's not a matter of looking up the appropriate cross-language synonyms in a dictionary; even intellectually knowing this in advance, though, the fact of it comes as an enjoyable surprise.

I've been working on various short translation and editing projects--mostly tests--that may lead to regular freelance employment, which would be really nice. In the process, I've stumbled across a few of those little gems you may have read about, the sort that seem especially common on the border between English and Chinese or Japanese.

One of my favorites is a possible translation given to me for "Il n'y a pas de reponse a votre recherche," which, I gather, was supposed to be the default no-match response to a search-engine query.
The translation that I was provided with by the software I'm using (and which I wasn't supposed to change) was, I thought, startlingly philosophical:

"There is no answer to your search."