Body wash
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The bottle of body wash affixed to the wall of the shower in the Cheyenne hotel where I'm staying is labeled in French as "Savon Liquide pour le Corps".
English "body wash" is two words consisting of eight letters. "Savon Liquide pour le Corps" is five words consisting of twenty-three letters.
We've discussed the phenomenon of French verbosity versus English brevity before. See "The genius and logic of French and English" 4/11/23) and "French vs. English" (8/2/15) — also about "soap".
Surely, I thought, the French do not have to be that loquacious just to say something so simple as "body wash".
So I looked up "body wash" on Google Translate, and what did it give me but "gel douche". Ahem! Whenever I see "douche", it always makes me think of something else. Bing yields "nettoyant pour le corps". "Nettoyant" doesn't seem right, because — at least to me — it sounds more like some sort of cleaner.
So far as I can tell, "gel douche" is the French equivalent of English "body wash". Both are two words, though French is one letter longer.
Selected readings
- "'Tis the Season: blooming in translation and in art" (4/11/17)
- "Blooming, embellishment, and bombs" (8/17/15)
- "The rise of douche" (11/15/09)
- "'Douchey uses of AI'" (8/16/19)
Annie Gottlieb said,
September 4, 2024 @ 8:33 pm
Isn't "douche" also the French word for "shower"? Yes, and "se doucher" is "to shower, to take a shower." So the correct translation of "gel douche" is "shower gel."
Chips Mackinolty said,
September 4, 2024 @ 8:49 pm
I often use Google Translate for fast and dirty, which, for Savon Liquide pour le Corps, gave me "Liquid body soap".
Gel douche gave me "shower gel".
Jenny Chu said,
September 4, 2024 @ 9:45 pm
Whenever I see someone say "it's longer in Language X than in Language Y" it is never specified whether it is true when translating in both directions.
If I translate bodywash from English to French then the French is longer. But if I translate some other phrase (se debrouiller? un frileux?) from French to English, maybe the English is longer.
My gut feel (backed up by no scientific evidence at all) suggests that the destination language is always longer because exactness is favored over conciseness.
Jim Mack said,
September 4, 2024 @ 10:09 pm
I'm sure there's a story behind the fact that, at least as far as the labels on hotel bath amenities are concerned, the French word for "shampoo" is "shampooing".
Thomas said,
September 5, 2024 @ 12:20 am
“Body wash” looks and feels like such a mundane word to me. It is called exactly what it does, modulo word order. It stands also with analogous words such as car wash. You can wash anything with an x wash. That is to say, I can see why the verbose French translation is aesthetically more pleasing than the handy two-word phrase in English.
loon said,
September 5, 2024 @ 2:33 am
'Body wash' and 'Car wash' are very distinct, to my mind. One is a liquid distributed in bottles, the other a building with specialized machines and staff. 'Wash' as a noun is also used for a thin coating of paint, which is somewhat the antithesis of what the 'wash' in 'body wash' is anticipated to do. 'Savon' is also connected to a chemical idea ('soap' = salt of a carboxylic acid), while the body wash is connected to an activity and could contain anything useful in that regard, soap or not. So the french version basically circumscribes what is in the bottle, while the english version instead hints at its use. Your balking at the term 'douche' might explain why the french version goes at it roundabout – for the anglophone market they might strive to avoid character strings that could be construed negatively, even from other languages. the french hypermarché Cora has an easy search, 'gel douche' brings up all the body washes, while 'savon liqiude' only brings up hand-soap dispensers. 'Sordophone' (https://gizmodo.com/help-me-coin-a-new-word-1677020108) was once proposed as a term to describe inocuous words from foreign languages that sound dirty if read as a string in english. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/words-that-sound-dirty has a few examples. Perhaps check on a speed related product sold in anglophone countries whether the swedish print tries to omit 'fart'.
Frans said,
September 5, 2024 @ 3:51 am
I was going to write something about how they're different things, but I'll note that English Wikipedia is also aware that liquid soap and shower gel are not the same thing:
So you have liquid soap for the hands, for the body, etc. In English that would be rendered as liquid hand soap, liquid body soap, etc.
Em said,
September 5, 2024 @ 4:42 am
As Jenny Chu says this is just a case of "translated-from-X", unidiomatic language, as is very common on multilingual packaging. In French (at least in France) body wash is labelled as "gel douche" or "crème de douche". Liquid soap is "savon liquide". "Nettoyant" is indeed mostly used for cleaning products.
Marc said,
September 5, 2024 @ 6:11 am
The goal of the makers of the body wash in question is not to provide a concise or idiomatic translation, but to sell as much product as possible. The only purpose of the French on the bottle is to enhance the appeal of the product to consumers who probably do not speak French. It lends an aura of prestige, and flatters the consumer that they can perhaps figure out what the phrase means using the French they remember from high school.
Charles in Toronto said,
September 5, 2024 @ 6:58 am
@Marc – Prestige would never occur to me. Assuming "Cheyenne" here refers to a US city (e.g. the one in Wyoming), it is also simply possible that the body wash manufacturers created English/French packaging so that it would satisfy Canadian label laws without printing two separate labels for US/Canada distribution.
Lars said,
September 5, 2024 @ 9:06 am
There can probably be legal reasons as well. I have here a bag of chili-flavored tortilla chips, and it says in Danish "Majstortillachips med chilismag". Swedish, Finnish, even Portuguese are similar. But then we get to Spanish: Producto aperitivo frito de maíz con sabor a pimiento picante. (And Slovak has something else too.) The only reason I can think of would be if 'tortilla chips' is some sort of protected designation in one or more Spanish-speaking countries.
Anthony said,
September 5, 2024 @ 10:43 am
Supposed the extra length in the target language is due to "translation bloom."
James Cumings said,
September 5, 2024 @ 11:23 am
How about just "Savon" for the bottle in the French shower? It's obviously not bar soap.
Victor Mair said,
September 5, 2024 @ 12:10 pm
@Lars
Very interesting.
What's the main language of the bag? English?
What's the English designation? "chili-flavored tortilla chips"
Since "tortilla" is a Spanish word and tortillas are a Mexican / Mesoamerican product, you'd think that their designation in Spanish would be straightforward and simple, that you wouldn't have to go through all the contortions of "Producto aperitivo frito de maíz con sabor a pimiento picante".
Terry K. said,
September 5, 2024 @ 12:41 pm
Tortilla in Spain refers to a type of omelette. So if the Spanish is for Spain, it wouldn't make sense to use the word tortilla in labelling tortilla chips. SpanishDictionary.com give nacho as Spain's word of tortilla chip, with the more general word being "chip de tortilla".
Chester Draws said,
September 5, 2024 @ 3:59 pm
@ Jenny Chu.
As a person who casually translates from French to English, I find English is almost always the terser.
My favourite is "anticlockwise" which is a pretty commonly used expression and has been around for ages, yet the French persist with "dans le sens inverse des aiguilles d'une montre"
KeithB said,
September 5, 2024 @ 4:57 pm
For anticlockwise, I use widdershins.
Scott P. said,
September 5, 2024 @ 5:15 pm
Widdershins means sideways in my idiolect, with a connotation of something moving in a direction it does not normally move.
Marc said,
September 5, 2024 @ 11:41 pm
@Charles – I guess it’s possible that the company is killing two birds with one stone. That is, complying with labeling laws in Canada, and aiming for prestige language cred in the US. But, I also think it’s significant that this is body wash and not tortilla chips.
In my local supermarket (Los Angeles) I tend to see what I suspect is prestige French on health and beauty product almost exclusively. I haven’t done a survey — nor do I know enough French — to tell if those French phrases are idiomatic or not. Would be interesting to do a study.
In Canada, do such bilingual labels tend to have idiomatic phrasing? Or, awkward ones as in this example? I suspect that they would be more likely to have idiomatic phrases to appeal to people who actually speak the language(s) in question.
Norman Smith said,
September 6, 2024 @ 12:43 pm
In the Canadian public service, documents are generally bilingual and might be originally drafted in either French or English. The French is nearly always longer.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 6, 2024 @ 2:34 pm
Sorry, _somebody_ has to post this link eventually:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO1ILQAGsU&pp=ygUYY2FuYWRpYW4gYmFjb24gYmlsaW5ndWFs
Howard Ross said,
September 6, 2024 @ 5:09 pm
@ KeithB
How long will anticlockwise remain intelligible or correct? It is so technology dependent.
Rodger C said,
September 7, 2024 @ 9:55 am
Howard Ross: Well, there's "countersunwise," but that only works in the northern hemisphere.
Benjamin Hall said,
September 8, 2024 @ 2:02 pm
As for anticlockwise, my idiolect uses counterclockwise. Autocorrect doesn’t even recognize the former. In fact, the former sounds like a hypercorrection from an ELL. Or maybe an attempt to sound posh. The meaning is clear, but i can’t say I've ever read it before. Maybe it’s a British/American divide?
ErikF said,
September 8, 2024 @ 3:35 pm
I just looked at a (Canadian) body wash from Kirkland and it says "nettoyant corporel". As far as I know, there isn't usually a standardized translation vocabulary for commercial products, so I would not be surprised at all if another company (or even the same company with a different product) decided to use another translation. Quebec-based companies might have a different set of rules due to provincial legislation, but I don't live there so don't fully know how it works there.