How do false friends differ between Russian and other languages

False friends between Russian and other languages differ mainly in their origins, types, and the language pairs involved. False friends are words that look or sound similar across languages but differ significantly in meaning. In the comparison of Russian with other languages, several distinctive characteristics emerge:

• Between Russian and English, false friends often arise from borrowed or pseudo-international words with differences in semantic fields, especially in specialized domains like business or economics. These false friends can lead to translation errors due to partial or completely different meanings despite similar appearances.

• In comparison with closely related Slavic languages (e.g., Polish or Ukrainian), false friends may also involve interlanguage homonyms and paronyms with subtle or sometimes more noticeable semantic shifts, influenced by historical language development and shared roots.

• The Russian language, when contrasted with non-Slavic languages such as French or English, shows false friends that sometimes reflect the different historical influences and the semantic changes that loanwords underwent. This makes Russian false friends sometimes more culturally or contextually embedded.

• Research points to the complex nature of interlanguage homonyms and paronyms as false friends, requiring both lexical-semantic and grammatical analysis to distinguish them. The Russian language presents these false friends notably in areas like financial, economic, and business terminology, where international terms may be deceptive for translators.

• False friends between Russian and other languages also reflect cultural-linguistic influences and the translation challenges they impose, making Russian learners and translators cautious about direct word-for-word interpretations.

In summary, false friends involving Russian differ in their linguistic complexity, semantic divergence, and influence from language contact, especially compared to English, Slavic languages, and other language families, often resulting in translation and communication challenges unique to the Russian language context.

References

• “The Translator’s False Friends” in the Financial and Economic Lexicon (Based on the Material of English and Russian Languages).

• THE PROBLEM OF UNDERSTANDING OF FALSE FRIENDS OF THE TRANSLATOR (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE RUSSIAN AND POLISH LANGUAGES)

• Classification of “false friends” in economic texts: Typical errors in English-to-Russian translation

• Some examples from a corpus investigation of potentially confusing polysemy and false friends in the terminology of music, centred on English and French, with equivalents in five other languages

• The Linguistic Trickery of French False Friends Frequent in English

• FORMAL PRINCIPLES FOR DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN INTERLINGUAL HOMONYMS AND PARONYMS AMONG FALSE FRIENDS

• Who’s afraid of false friends? Cognate ratios in translated and non-translated Dutch

• Semantic Analysis of «False- Friends»: A Case Study of English and Siin Seereer

• English Multi-word Expressions as False Friends between German and Russian: Corpus-driven Analyses of Phraseological Units

• Normative study of 500 general-knowledge of true-false questions for Russian young adults.

• False Memories in Native and Foreign Languages

• False Memories in Native and Foreign Languages

• On “False Friends” in the Field of Economics

• Deception detection in Russian texts

• Exploring the “Enemy” in the Russian, English and Chinese Languages and Cultures

• On “historical unity” of Russian and Ukrainian: A linguistic perspective on language conflict and change

• Russian Language in the Intercultural Communication Space: Modern Problem Paradigm

• The Language of Russian Fake Stories: A Corpus-Based Study of the Topical Change in the Viral Disinformation

• Representation of “Other” in Russian and German Media Discourse

• Russian English and what it is not