How do false friends impact the accuracy of translations

False friends—words in two languages that look or sound similar but differ significantly in meaning—can negatively impact translation accuracy by causing misunderstandings or incorrect word choices. Translators who mistakenly map a false friend to the equivalent word in the target language may produce translations that are semantically incorrect or misleading, leading to errors in conveying the original text’s intended meaning. This phenomenon challenges both human and machine translation quality, as false friends can trigger lexical errors, undermine clarity, and distort the message, especially in languages with many close lexical overlaps.

In translation studies and machine translation research, false friends are recognized as a significant source of lexical errors that affect the fidelity and reliability of translated texts. Such errors may cause loss of nuance, context misinterpretation, or communication breakdown, particularly in complex or technical content. Proper identification and contextual disambiguation of false friends are necessary to maintain translation accuracy and to avoid misinformation or mistranslation in cross-lingual communication. ^{1, 2, 3}

In sum, false friends impact translation accuracy by increasing the risk of lexical mistakes and semantic distortions that degrade the quality and faithfulness of translations.

References

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• Common Lexical Errors Made by Machine Translation On Cultural Text

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