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.