What are some common false friends in Russian that can lead to translation errors

Common false friends in Russian that can lead to translation errors are words that look or sound similar to words in another language, often English, but have different meanings. These false friends can cause misunderstandings and inaccurate translations, especially in fields like economics, finance, legal texts, and general communication.

Examples of false friends in Russian include:

• Words that resemble English words but have different meanings or connotations.
• “Pseudo-international” or “interlanguage homonyms” that can cause confusion due to partial or complete differences in meaning despite similar form.
• False friends also appear across parts of speech—nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs—that often lead to translation errors.

For instance, in economic and legal contexts, translators often struggle with pseudo-international words that seem cognate but differ semantically, causing typical errors in meaning transfer.

Additionally, some Russian words may seem familiar due to phonetic or graphic similarity to words in other languages but are semantically distinct, leading to mistranslation mistakes that disrupt communication.

Awareness and systematic study of these false friends, including their grammatical and lexical characteristics, can improve translation quality and prevent errors in understanding between Russian and other languages. ^{2, 3, 5, 12}

If desired, a more specific list of common Russian false friends can be provided for particular contexts or languages.

References

• An der Schnittstelle von Translations- und Interkomprehensionsdidaktik: Ergebnisse einer Fallstudie zur slawischen Interkomprehension

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

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

• Features of translating gastronomic realia from German into Russian

• Modern dictionary of French and Russian pseudoequivalents

• False friends in english‐Spanish translations in computer science literature

• Development of translation skills among Chinese students in the process of professional training of linguists majoring in “Russian as a foreign language”

• Semantička analiza grešaka prilikom prevođenja međujezičkih homonima i paronima na primerima medicinskih termina u nastavi engleskog jezika

• Afghan Folktales from Herat: Persian Texts in Transcription and Translation by Youli Ioannesyan (review)

• Diferencias de tratamiento en el manejo de los falsos amigos entre lenguas próximas y lejanas bajo el prisma de la enseñanza de la traducción

• SEMANTIC MISTAKES IN TRANSLATIONS OF DIALOGUE FROM GERMAN INTO RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

• Systematization of English legal pseudo-international vocabulary in translation into Russian

• A Language Model for Grammatical Error Correction in L2 Russian

• Tendencies of Translation Manipulation Strategies in Anglophone Mass Media: The Case of the “Collective West”

• False Memories in Native and Foreign Languages

• CLSE: Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities

• Applying Translation Mistakes Classifications To Work Out The Translation Quality Assessment Criteria

• Problems of Non-equivalent Words in Technical Translation

• Translation as a tool in linguistic analysis

• Common Lexical Errors Made by Machine Translation On Cultural Text