Anaesthesia

The last entry is le respirateur d’anesthésie, and the two languages have hung the same pair of words on opposite objects. In English today the machine that breathes for a patient is a ventilator, and « respirator » has drifted almost wholly out of the hospital and into the workplace: it is a mask, the protective sort, so a form asking whether respirators were worn is asking about faces and not about beds. French went the other way and left the machine on the older word. Le respirateur is the apparatus, être sous respirateur is to be on a ventilator, and the protective mask is never called that: it is un masque de protection respiratoire. The mirror image is worth holding too. Un ventilateur, said on its own in ordinary French, is the electric fan on a desk, much as « ventilator » in English can still be the grille in a roof. So render le respirateur d’anesthésie as « the anaesthetic machine », or « the anaesthetic ventilator » where the breathing part alone is meant, and keep « respirator » for the thing that goes over a nose.