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.