Are there specific dictionaries that list Russian false friends
Yes, there are specific dictionaries that focus on Russian false friends, often referred to as “pseudoequivalents” or “translator’s false friends.” These dictionaries address pairs of words in Russian and another language (often English or French) that look or sound similar but differ significantly in meaning. Some works include detailed explanations of grammatical, lexical, etymological, and context differences between false friend pairs, making them useful for professional translators and language learners.
For example, there is a modern dictionary of French and Russian pseudoequivalents with over 1700 pairs, designed to help translators avoid mistakes caused by false friends. Other similar dictionaries and lists target English-Russian false friends especially in specific domains like economics, law, or phraseology.
Such resources are increasingly developed as academic and professional lexicographic efforts and may be found in specialized linguistic literature or translation studies publications rather than general-purpose dictionaries.
References
-
English-Russian False Friends in ELT Classes with Intercultural Communicative Perspectives
-
The problem of false friends for Russian learners of English
-
Systematization of English legal pseudo-international vocabulary in translation into Russian
-
RUSSE’2018: A Shared Task on Word Sense Induction for the Russian Language
-
A Corpus-Based Approach to Lexicography: A New English-Russian Phraseological Dictionary
-
From Name to Myth (Based on Russian Cultural and Literary Tradition)
-
Structural And Semantic Properties Of Russian And Tatar Phraseological Units–Malevolence