I use "fin de semaine" and people understands it perfectly.

Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages.

P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation looks completely different?

Here are the Translations for weekend for each Romance language and Latin:

French - fin de semaine

Spanish - fin de semana

Romanian - sfârșit de săptămână

Portuguese - final de semana

Italian - fine settimana

Latin - volutpat vestibulum

Notice how only Latin looks completely different. I wonder if google translate is broken.

Ancient Romans just didn't use weeks, so the translation is probably a modern one. The closest to a weekend is a market day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae

For Portuguese at least it's most likely translating word-for-word. The term is "fim-de-semana" ("fim" rather than "final", and hyphens signifying a compound word)

In German it's Wochenende (Woche = week, Ende = end), which is literally the literal translation. ... de.wiktionary.org tells me it was adopted from English, too, after World War I.

Huh. I did not know it was such a young word. :)

Isn't it vacancelle in French? Never heard fin de semaine... although most just say le weekend.

I have never heard vacancelle in France. But le week-end all the time. Even my kid’s school teachers used it. “Bon week-end!” Never heard fin de semaine even among my old country neighbors in Provence. My anecdote doesn’t make it fact of course. Most French people I know don’t pay any attention to the Academie Française.