Watch out for false friends

When watching a film—which was shot in English—translated into Spanish, sometimes someone who knows both languages very well notices some words or phrases were translated incorrectly. In my opinion, a high percentage of those mistakes are made because the “translators” may think their knowledge of one of the languages in question is good enough for them to be able to perform the delicate task of translating from one language to the other, and when find a word that looks similar to a word in their mother tongue, think the corresponding word in the other language must have the same meaning. Thus, one can hear in a film that a line like “I’m a doctor, actually” was incorrectly translated into “Soy doctor, actualmente”, which, when correctly translated back into English is “I’m a doctor, currently”. One word completely changes the meaning of the sentence and the persons watching the film translated into Spanish cannot understand it as it was originally conceived. However, a good translation of the original phrase is “Soy doctor, en realidad” or “Soy doctor, realmente”, where the English adverb actually is correctly translated into the Spanish adverb realmente (pronounced /realménte/). The problem here is that the so-called translator wrongly associated the English adverb actually with the Spanish adverb actualmente /actualménte/, which means currently. He or she should have known that these words are false friends.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives as a second definition of false friend, “a word in a foreign language that looks similar to a word in your own language, but has a different meaning” (551). Another good example of a false friend is the word sensible, which in Spanish could be confused with the word that is spelled exactly the same way, but has a different meaning. If one wants to translate sensible into Spanish, the correct word to use is sensato /sensáto/. The Spanish word sensible /sensíble/ means sensitive. 

There are many false friends in Spanish; however, I have mentioned only a few of them so far and others can be seen below (see table 1 and the following paragraphs). I can assure you that if you know both English and Spanish very well, you will be able to find out by yourself some of these special words without looking up in a dictionary. Nonetheless, the meaning of the false friends referred to in this blog post have been verified by the aforementioned procedure.

Table 1

A very short list of false friends in Spanish

English Word	Spanish False Friend	Meaning of Spanish Word
comprehensive	comprensivo	understanding
honesty	honestidad	decency
miserable	miserable	mean; despicable
molest	molestar	to annoy; to be a nuisance

Source: Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 435. Print.^a

    a. Note: The actual list in the dictionary is much longer and provides more meanings for some of the Spanish words, as well as an abbreviation next to each English word indicating whether it is a noun, an adjective, or an adverb.

In order to see the importance of being aware of false friends, let’s suppose an American woman visiting Peru makes friends with a Peruvian woman and, one day when they are talking about how different their childhoods were, living in different countries and exposed to different cultures, the latter tells her American friend that a male friend of her big sister’s “used to molest her until his family moved away”. Definitely, the American friend will be very shocked and feel sorry for her new Peruvian female friend, and is likely to tell her how sorry she is and ask her whether she told her parents and if the police prosecuted the wicked man. The Peruvian woman would think her American friend is overreacting to such a silly and mischievous behavior of her sister’s friend. What she wanted to say was that her sister’s friend “used to annoy her by taunting her a lot”; but she was misled by the similarity between the spelling of the Spanish verb molestar and the English verb molest and chose this word inappropriately. Let’s consider another plausible scenario: the Peruvian woman does not speak English but the American woman speaks Spanish well enough to hold short conversations—she will master it while living in Peru, anyway. The same conversation takes place, yet completely in Spanish, and when the American woman hears her Peruvian friend say that “un amigo de su hermana solía molestarla hasta que su familia se mudó a otra ciudad” she feels very shocked and tells her friend the same words she told her in the first scenario because she wrongly associated the Spanish verb molestar with the English verb molest. In both cases, there was a misconception of the meaning of a word which led to miscommunication.

False friends are indeed the main reason for incorrect translations from English to another language and vice versa, and I have witnessed people making mistakes because of them in situations other than translating a film. For instance, in a televised lecture given by a scientist who spoke English, in which he advocated Creationism, the translator said sulfuro when the scientist said sulfur. Sulfur is a chemical element which is called azufre in Spanish, whereas sulfuro is the Spanish word for sulfide, a kind of compounds containing sulfur.

Spanish is not the only language that has words looking similar to English words; other European languages do, too. If you are a non-native English speaker, can you name a few words that have false friends in English?

Works Cited

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.

Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.