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.

That's not what prepositions are for

Some years ago, as I continued the pleasant journey through my English learning process, I was thrilled when I discovered I was able to construct a sentence like It is the best company one can work for. In Spanish—my mother tongue—a sentence like this would sound very odd and is not permitted, so it is not strange that up until today I have not seen such construction. An acceptable translation into Spanish of the sentence in question is Es la mejor compañía para la que uno puede trabajar, while the literal translation, that is, Es la mejor compañía uno puede trabajar para, sounds weird. In English it sounds good to me, so I was surprised when I learnt that one is not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition.

Two articles published in The Guardian, one by David Marsh, “10 grammar rules you can forget: how to stop worrying and write proper”, and the other one by Steven Pinker, “10 'grammar rules' it's OK to break (sometimes)”, address this issue—among other grammar rules. The writers state that the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition was created by John Dryden, who declared that it was not elegant to do otherwise because in Latin “the equivalent to a preposition is attached to a noun and cannot be separated from it” (Pinker). By the way, Spanish compares to Latin in this respect, but that is a matter of another discussion.

I was relieved when I read they recommend that one should not follow this rule strictly. There are cases when it is OK to violate this rule, and Pinker points out that one should choose “pied-piping”—putting a preposition in front of a “wh” word, as in The road along which you are walking—when using a formal style and leaving the preposition at the end of the sentence “when it contributes a crucial bit of information”; while Marsh remarks “to ignore this rule”. I agree with Pinker about the fact that leaving a preposition at the end of a sentence can make it finish “with a word that is too lightweight to serve as its focal point”. He gives an example of how a sentence could lose its power, by moving the preposition for from its original position to the end in a sentence that was part of the words Abraham Lincoln said in an important occasion. One can see that, in doing so, the resultant sentence lacks the gravity that is appropriate in such situation. On the other hand, I do also agree with him upon when to leave a preposition at the end of a sentence, and I am pleased that he listed as an example of such use—before he gave this word of advice—a sentence that is part of the lyrics of a popular rock song. Now, I ask: How could The Beatles have written the line “it's you she's thinking of” in their song She Loves You had they not realised the sentence sounded beautiful? It completes the idea of giving the hero of the song hope of getting his girl back. And this song is precisely one of the many I have grown fond of, and listened to a lot of times as an exercise for improving my English-listening capabilities. So, since this kind of construction was used by a famous and beloved rock band, it is obvious the use had been widely accepted for a long time, for the composers were young and, being the English language their expression tool along with music, they used it both in daily communication and in creative writing.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is one of the matters grammarians have been discussing for years. John Dryden commenced its prohibition, but the use of the language allows us to ignore this rule when appropriate, being up to the writer when to do so, as long as they are sensible of what they want the tone of their pieces of writing to be, and it does not happen to the detriment of the beauty and power of the sentence, and thus, of the words surrounding it. It is common among languages influenced by Latin that controversies arise in language usage, amid which some people are very passionate while others take a fairly relaxed attitude towards these grammar quarrels. English has not escaped this fate. Why does a non-native English speaker care about this subject? you may be wondering. Well, I do care. I am a user of the language too. Being bilingual, I testify Spanish has its problems as well, though as far as English is concerned, I regard this very issue as very interesting. And right now I am thinking this is one of the wondrous features of English that make it a beautiful language. What are you thinking of?

Works cited

Marsh, David. “10 grammar rules you can forget: how to stop worrying and write proper.”   The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies, 30 Sept. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.

Pinker, Steven. “10 'grammar rules' it's OK to break (sometimes).” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies, 15 Aug. 2014. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.

The Beatles. “She Loves You.” PAST MASTERS. EMI Records Ltd., 2009. CD.

Painting My Writing

I used to draw and paint when I was a young man. I have enjoyed drawing and painting since I was a child; and, when I was in the last two years of high school, I considered the possibility of becoming an artist, being inspired by the masterpieces of Picasso, Ingres, Degas, and Michelangelo. Even though I enrolled in the chemical engineering program at university, I have not lost my taste in art and I sketch something from time to time, always keeping in mind the basics of this art form, which I learnt while a student at the local art school of my city many years ago.

Nowadays, as I have embarked on keeping a blog in English, every time I prepare a new blog post, I have to go through the same process of writing—whose stages remind me of those of drawing and painting—that for me, being a non-native English speaker, may be more difficult than for those who grew up speaking the language of Dickens.

Writing is like drawing and painting in many ways. First, you have to decide what you will draw or paint. This step involves choosing the object or person that will be your model and setting up the scenery that will surround them. This is the composition stage. Then, you need to choose the materials that will best express your artistic point of view, that is, what you intend to say to the people that view your piece of art about the objects in it. If you aim to create a drawing, will you use chalk, charcoal, pencil, or ink? But if you decide to produce a painting, which will be the best choice: oil, watercolour, or acrylic? Perhaps it would be a good idea to mix materials. After that, one begins to sketch the picture. The artist may make as many sketches as they want until they do one after which their finished work will be produced. Many studies might be leaning against the wall of the artist's atelier at the end of this stage. Finally, attention to the details—light and shade, colour tones, brush strokes—is given, making sure every one of them adds to the original sentiment you wanted to express.

In writing, you first decide on a topic. Sometimes the topic brings the genre within itself and sometimes you have to choose the one that best suits what you want to say. The topic in writing is like the model in drawing and painting, and the genre is for a writer what the drawing and painting materials are for the artist. Perhaps a poem may say what you feel about the topic more appropriately, or a novel could depict your thoughts and show your creativity in a better way. In the end it will depend on you, your preferences, and your aptitude for the genre. The next step in the writing process is to jot down all the ideas that come to mind and make the necessary refinements. This stage is similar to the one where an artist makes their sketches. For instance, you may begin with five paragraphs when writing an essay and end up publishing seven paragraphs, or an author can cut a scene from the first chapter of their novel and include it in the third. The editing process ends when the writer is satisfied with the final work (yet some say they could have written something better), which relates to the attention given to the details in the drawing and painting process.

All of the steps described above, however, cannot be taken without the proper foundations in the art form you want to practise. How to hold a pencil and a brush, the way you must give a line its rhythm, the significance of brush strokes, knowing how to represent light and shade, in the drawing and painting case; and, knowing where to put a word in a sentence, the agreement of a subject and its verb, correct spelling and punctuation, among other grammar issues in the writing case; constitute a compulsory education you must acquire and the first step towards mastering the art form in question. In order for you to accomplish that, a lot of practice is required along the path.

When I started studying drawing, I realised I not only had to draw everyday but also study the works of the great masters. Similarly, it is well-known that every would-be author must read many works of literature and write copiously. I do not pretend to be an accomplished artist, nor can I say I am a published author, but I assure you I have learnt that an excellent ground in grammar is the door to creative writing, as mastering classical-style drawing justifies evolving into Cubism.

As far as the writing of an enthusiastic non-native English speaker is concerned, the major emphasis is placed on grammar; so I am aware of its crucial importance for a good command of the lingua franca of today's world. While being taught English as a second language, once a student learns to arrange the words in a sentence, they are already able to communicate with the world by speaking and by writing. As soon as they can write well, they attempt to write a composition and eventually find themselves editing their own works. My experience is no exception.

Reviewing every piece of writing I write is a decisive step I take in enhancing my style. In doing so, correcting my grammar is commonplace. Having nobody as my appointed English teacher, I rely on the best teachers a learner of English writing can look for: English-written novels. I remember I desperately wanted to have a copy of any of the English classics when I was in my last year of high school. My English teacher had required us to read an excerpt from The Call of the Wild, and when I opened it, I was totally fascinated by the articulation of the story and greatly enjoyed it. I decided I had to have, if not the same book in a complete version, another one. It was not until 2011 that I could afford an unabridged copy of a novel in English, and since then I have bought several of such books and have read the majority of them. (In this link you can see a list of the books I have read so far). In reading them, I have been convinced by the authors' mastery that grammar has been an essential component of their education. Fortunately, English grammar became one of my interests when I began to study the language.

Life has exposed me to art, of which, the forms I enjoy the most are drawing, painting, and literature. Despite the fact that I am neither an artist nor an author yet, I testify that there exist necessary foundations that aspirant artists and authors must lay, on which they can safely build their careers. Would Ingres have made such magnificent drawings, so that he is regarded as one of the greatest representatives—the greatest to me—of Neoclassicism, without having studied and practised drawing for years? Would Picasso have produced the astonishingly beautiful post-Cubism expressionist art he created if he had not already mastered figurative art? Would J. R. R. Tolkien have been able to write The Hobbit and the The Lord of the Rings novel series if he had not studied English grammar?

On Reading A Novel In English

Several months ago I finished Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. As I stated in my last post, I decided to read it without consulting a dictionary and simply trying to infer the meaning of the words from the context. I did so. I just sat cross-legged on my bed holding no more than the book in my hands and began the journey to the amusing world of Tom Sawyer and his fellow rascal Huck Finn, by doing a straightforward reading and hoping to understand the depicted adventures on my own.

Although I gained time, I could only gain a somewhat incomplete understanding of the novel. A number of unknown words referring to nature, others used to describe landscapes, and the slang used and the dialects spoken in the Mississippi river's surrounding area at mid-nineteenth century, appeared as I advanced through the pages of the book. It is clear the prospect of understanding all those words appeared unlikely but I managed to most of the times. The crux of the matter is I was able to arrive at the final page after a few weeks (by reading four to six pages a day), so I did fulfil the main goal: to enjoy the reading while doing it continuously.

When I finished the book I felt so glad that I sprang to my feet, headed towards my wardrobe, took my copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out of it (yes, I keep some of my books in my wardrobe, my bookcase is too small) and began to read it the same way; of course it worked this time too. I was so excited to discover that this novel is, in some way, a continuation of the former, and was keen to totally read it in the course of a few days, but some days after I had started I got distracted by earthly matters. Notwithstanding, I had already proved to myself that one can read a novel written in a foreign language–at least one written in English, for non-native English speakers–without stopping every time they encounter an unknown word in order to look it up in a dictionary, and can, if not completely understand the novel, get an overall impression of it.

The next step is to reread the novel, this time using a dictionary. I am sure this undertaking will take longer than the preceding one, yet it will bring the satisfaction of understanding every single written word and thus the whole book on completion of the process of enjoying a great piece of writing. From now on I'll follow this procedure.

This way of approaching the reading of a novel, that is, to try to understand new words in their context, is found in Reading Comprehension exercises in tests given to students both when learning a new language and as a method of learning new words in their mother tongue. I reckon everybody has experienced it, one way or the other. So, it is obvious I am not the first person whom this idea has ever occurred to; and since it is universally acknowledged as a very good manner to learn new words, wouldn't it be reasonable to think this style of reading is highly appropriate for training the brain and accustoming it to the act of inferring?

How to enjoy a good book written in English, for non-native English speakers

It was in 2010 when I purchased a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and when I began to read it, I found verbs and expressions I could only understand if I looked them up in a dictionary. Up until that day I thought I would be able to read the book in a few hours because it is meant to be written for kids. I have some experience reading technical articles, which are written by engineers and scientists and I understand them all perfectly, so reading a book for kids was not going to be big deal. I was totally wrong. The first three pages are full with many words that I had to look up in a dictionary and soon I felt as though I did not know enough English. But, wait a minute, the book was written for children! Why did not I, a student of the Intermediate program of an English course at that time, understand those words? This was too disappointing.

At first I looked up every word whose meaning I did not know, but this took a lot of time and hurt the pleasure of reading because I had to stop doing it for a while. I did this for some days but then I realized it would take me too long to finish the book and was getting bored. I was not enjoying the reading. I used to read the book one page a day every two days until I had to travel to Lima for work. I had read the first chapter of the book and three pages of the second.

This year I took the English lessons again and wanted to read a good book in English once more. I bought copies of other novels and decided to read one written by a renowned English writer. This novel is not intended for children and is regarded as one of the greatest novels of all times, so I was sure I was going to discover a good fountain of joy for my hunger of culture. There was I seeing the book, touching it and wondering what wonderful stories it would bring, when I opened it and started reading. To my surprise, I found myself looking up in a dictionary again. Would the story repeat again? It appeared so.

One day I decided to read without using a dictionary each time I encountered a new unknown word. I realized it was a good way to read. I would try to understand the words in their context and read continuously; this way I would appreciate more the stories and my brain would work more. What is better, I would not stop many times and could enjoy the reading much more.

I have found this system works well and when I had read two chapters of this English novel, I remembered I had stopped reading the Mark Twain's book. So, I put the English book on the bookshelf and took the American one. This time I started it over, without stopping when finding a new word.

Now I have read six chapters and in applying the system described above I have been relishing reading this great American piece of writing. I have decided to look up the unknown words when I finish the book, and then I will continue with the English novel.