engleski

Impact of Language Proficiency on Error Rate in Croatian-English False Friends

The article investigates the pairs of words in two languages that share the same form but have different etymologies and completely or partially different meanings in different languages. Such cases of formal congruence and semantic non- equivalence are known as false friends. Although formal congruence is prototypical for false friends (e.g. afirmirati – affirm), the authors also deal with false friends which do not share the same form, such as radni (naslov) – working (title) instead of tentative (title). As false friends can cause difficulty for students learning a foreign language, because students are likely to misidentify the words due to linguistic interference, the authors investigate the error rate in Croatian – English false friends. The authors asked the first, second , third and fourth year students of English language and literature to translate from Croatian into English short texts containing words translation of which often results in the occurrence of false friends. The goal was to see if the level of education and formal exposure to the concept of false friends (first year students were not formally exposed to this concept, due to the fact that the research was conducted at the beginning of the academic year) would influence the error rate in their translations. The article opens with a short theoretical overview of the issue, followed by the presentation of results of the research, and closes with a discussion of these results.

false friend ; English ; Croatian

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