Cherish your false friends

Hello hello and welcome back to Babel Babble! You’ve all probably heard about someone who tried to say that they’re embarrassed in Spanish only to fumble and say that they’re pregnant. This is what we call a “false friend”.— a word that sounds similar in two languages but means very different things. In my language learning journeys, I heard and witnessed my fair share of these. Some examples include:

• A Ukrainian girl asking the Turkish waiter for some sik (juice in Ukrainian, to fuck in Turkish);

• Me trying to buy some sniffing tabak (tobacco in Lithuanian, plate in Turkish);

• Folk complaining about having a constipated nose (sounds perfectly fine in Spanish)

• Every Lithuanian laughing in Poland laughing at Salon Urody (beauty salon in Polish, uggo salon in Lithuanian)…

False friends can be dangerous, especially in sensitive areas like medical translation. They also lead to many mistakes in translated literary works. A Russian translation of Asimov had Mosaic law misinterpreted as mosaic law (as in mosaic tile), another translator thought that a public house is a brothel. And don’t get me started on skeletons in the toilet (klozet)… False friends are also a comedic element in many sitcoms exploiting the “clueless foreigner” trope/stereotype, including Fawlty Towers:

But false friends can be extremely beneficial. After all, even though the embarassing/embarazada mistake is going to be repeated by folk around the world ad infinitum, because of this mistake many people will actually remember the Spanish word for pregnant more easily.

False friends can help you learn more vocabulary with less effort. The Swedish word for holidays (semestr) sounds too much like semester (the opposite of a holiday in my book) for me not to remember it. And well, it is safe to say I’ll never remember the Turkish word for character (huy), as it sounds just like the worst swearword in Russian.

So embrace your false friends! And if you got any funny stories, share them in the comments below :).