TRANSLATION OF FALSE FRIENDS AMONG B2 LEVEL ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Abstract

This paper investigates how successful B2 level English language learners (ELLs), high school students are in translating a group of most common false friends (FFs) from English to BCS and vice versa and examines whether they are more successful in translating absolute or partial FFs. In line with the classification by Otwinowska-Kasztelanic (2015), false friends are considered to be a class of cognates. They are further sub-classified into absolute FFs, which have the same or similar form and dissimilar meaning in two languages (e.g. eventually, meaning finally in English and eventualno, meaning possibly in BCS) and partial false friends with the same or similar form and one same and another dissimilar meaning. (e.g. argument in English, meaning reason, the same as argument in BSC and disagreement, the meaning for which a different word is used in BCS, rasprava). Due to their deceptive nature, FFs have been researched within different theoretical frameworks - theoretical, contrastive, applied linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and translation studies. By means of a survey and descriptive and inferential statistics, this paper confirms the hypothesis that there is a statistically significant difference between correct translation of FFs from English to BCS and their correct translation from BCS to English. Furthermore, the second hypothesis was also confirmed, namely that the B2 ELLs are more successful in translating partial than in translating absolute FFs. The research results suggest that in teaching FFs as items of deceptive vocabulary both explicit and implicit methods need to be applied