One of the problem of speaking multiple langages is that sometimes things have parallel meanings. While I have no issue understanding expressions that somehow overlap between langages, I noticed I never use some expressions that somehow sound wrong to me. Here are some examples:
- Maker Faire
- Faire means to make in French, so this sounds very redundant.
- Dressed to kill
- Dresser means to train in French, and is mainly used with animals, so this does not sound so nice.
- Gifted Children
- Gift means poison in German and I don’t like the ideas that people have about gifted children anyways.
In some sense, those expressions are similar to multi-lingual garden path sentences, but with the ambiguity at the langage level instead of the gramatical level. Do you have such expressions yourselves?
Ça veut dire quoi “maker faire” ?
C’est une foire pour les types qui bricolent des choses (http://makerfaire.com/).
J’ai le même problème pour “gifted children” pour les mêmes raisons. Ça me choque à chaque fois que je le lis. Bizarrement, le sens allemand ne m’arrive pas au conscient si je lis la version avec le substantif : “he has a gift”.
Seltsam.
bon mais ca devrait pas être fair, la foire et alors c’est plus gai ?