False Friends and Translation: A Case Study of Iraqi Students of Translation

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of false friends (or false cognates) and its impact on English-Arabic Translation. Samples of final exam sheets are taken as case study. The study covers 200 translation students (100 morning students and 100 evening students). The study finds out that 76.5% of students made mistakes regarding false friends. The paper presents definitions, types and the sources of confusion resulting from dealing with false friends. The first type is related to common mistake that two expressions are similar in some way but they are totally different since they belong to different cultures, English and Arabic are cases in point. The translation mistake regarding this type was the problem of 31% of those who made false friends errors. The second type is related to the students' misunderstanding of the source language words themselves and it covers 61.25% of the students. The third type of false friends found in the case study resulted from the etymological misunderstanding of the expressions in the case study sample texts .This type covers 39.75% of the students. The fourth type of false friends is resulted from borrowed words and it covers 8.65% of the students. It is concluded that the students need to improve their lexical, semantic, and etymological background knowledge as ways of avoiding such confusion.