I've been working on a new batch of translations for my employer, and the word that I'm hesitating on right now is ''ventre''. I think I will translate it as stomach. I have a degree in Biology, so I know that a stomach should be the actual organ, but I've checked some online dictionaries and they do have ''the abdominal region'' as one of the definitions.
Most of the time if you look up a French-English translation for ''ventre'' it will give you ''belly''. You even have Émile Zola's ''Le Ventre de Paris'' translated as ''The Belly of Paris'', which I think sounds terrible. When I hear someone talk about a belly, the image coming to my mind is that of a paunch. I think most people who are using this word nowadays are using it in a context more like that. Perhaps it's time for the bilingual dictionaries to update.
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