Patisserie

The tenth entry is incorporer en plusieurs fois, and the verb inside it is one an English reader recognises and then mistranslates in both directions at once. In the kitchen incorporer is not « to incorporate ». It names the gentle movement that takes one mixture into another without knocking the air out of it, and the settled English term is « to fold in »: incorporer les blancs is to fold the whites in, and « incorporate the whites » reads like a translation nobody finished. Away from the bowl the French verb goes where English never follows it. Incorporer is what an army does to a conscript — il a été incorporé en mars says he was called up and posted to his regiment, and l’incorporation is that induction. Meanwhile the one sense an English reader is surest of does not exist in French at all: a company is never incorporée. It is constituée or immatriculée, and the « Inc. » on a letterhead has no French counterpart waiting to be written.