False Cognates Research Articles

Beloved, Breathing Lesson, The Russia House, Rabbit at Rest, No Greater Love, and Rising Sun translated into Portuguese

Do ponto de vista do ato tradutório, considera-se o texto literário como valorizando os aspectos estético-estilísticos, de modo que a importância dada à linguagem do autor é comparável com o conteúdo do texto. Por meio da aplicação do modelo Aubert (1984, 1997, 1998) em seis romances norte-americanos (publicados durante os anos de 1987 a 1994) e as respectivas traduções para o português, realizou-se uma análise das semelhanças e diferenças lingüísticas, estilísticas e culturais entre os textos de partida e os textos de chegada. Com base em dois diferentes níveis de análise, pôde-se observar que a tradução literária solicita um aumento no uso da modulação (590 itens lexicais = 20,0%, ou seja, correspondendo a 1/5 do total do córpus) a fim de dar conta dos campos temático e léxico abarcados pelos autores na língua inglesa e das características estilísticas possibilitadas pela língua portuguesa. Por outro lado, é mais elevada a freqüência da tradução literal (1048 itens lexicais = 34.9%) e da transposição (875 itens lexicais = 29.2%). Ainda que Vinay (1968) alegue que se deva evitar a tradução literal devido aos riscos de falsos cognatos bem como as considerações de alguns teóricos (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1958; Nida, 1964) de que as adaptações sejam muito empregadas na tradução, sobretudo na de textos literários, os dados da pesquisa mostram que mais da metade (64,1%) dos textos analisados valeram-se da tradução literal, quer em sentido estrito (“palavra por palavra”), quer em sentido lato, ou seja, da transposição. Com base nos resultados obtidos, poder-se-ia supor que essas duas modalidades são predominantes na direção inglês->português e que podem ser empregadas adequadamente também na tradução de textos literários.

Research on Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Issues and Challenges

The papers that have been assembled for this book cover a wide range of topics relating to the use of Spanish in the U.S.A. They stem for the most part from the 17th National Conference on Spanish in the United States, held in Miami-Dade County in March, 1999. In addition to linguistic and sociolinguistic coverage, issues are explored relating to ideology and politics. Leaving aside John Lipski’s useful though rather stolid introductory survey of existing research, the book is divided into seven sections. The first of these ostensibly covers bilingualism and interpreting, although the focus is very much on the latter, with detailed discussions of practical issues such as bad practice in law courts and the pitfalls associated with false cognates. Following this there are three papers that have a generally historical orientation: Rebeca Acevedo traces the development of the Spanish verb paradigm in Californian Spanish, concluding that this is undergoing a process of simplification that parallels what occurred in vernacular Romance. Ysaura Bernal-Enriquez looks for the social and historical factors that conspired in the loss of Spanish in the Southwest. And Garlan Bills gives a largely cartographic presentation of Nahuatl lexical penetration in New Mexico. The next section, entitled Borrowings, has papers on morphological adaptations of Anglicisms in the Southwest, the nature of phrasal calques in Chicano Spanish (are they linguistic or cultural?), borrowings in Cuban-American speech, and strategies for adapting words that are borrowed into Spanish. Next there is a rather loose section that focuses on “discourse-oriented” issues, such as Narrative and Codeswitching, the latter of course being one of the sacred cows of research on bilingualism in the U.S.A. Following this there are six papers on sociolinguistics and pragmatics: language and self-definition among Dominicans in the U.S.A., language maintenance among Cuban Americans in Miami, attitudes towards Spanish, literacy, forms of address, and politeness strategies. The optimistically entitled Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax chapter is a little thin, but has a useful piece on the elimination from U.S.A. Spanish of the alveolar trill [r] (the remaining two papers in the section are on estar in MexicanAmerican Spanish and morphosyntax among university students in California). The final section deals with issues that pertain to ideology and politics: intraethnic attitudes among Hispanics in northern California, language politics about Spanish in Puerto Rico, demographic changes in Florida and their significance for educational policy, and bilingual education in the U.S.A. Like much writing on U.S.A. Spanish, this book suffers from being too compartmentalized, with no overall themes or general conclusions. This stems in part from the fact that the book consists basically in a set of conference proceedings. But there is a more fundamental 504

Identifying German–English cognates, false cognates, and non-cognates: methodological issues and descriptive norms

We investigated 563 German–English nouns for the purposes of identifying cognates, false cognates and non-cognates. Two techniques for identifying cognates were used and compared: (i) De Groot and Nas's (1991) similarity-rating technique and (ii) a translation-elicitation task similar to that of Kroll and Stewart (1994). The results obtained with English-speaking participants produced 112 cognates, 94 false cognates, and 357 non cognates and indicated that the two techniques yielded similar findings. Rated similarity of German–English translation pairs and translation accuracy were positively correlated. We also investigated whether the presence of German-specific characters and the availability of German pronunciation information influenced similarity ratings and translation accuracy. Ratings for translation pairs in which the German word contained a language-specific character were lower and the word was translated less accurately. Participants provided with pronunciation information rated German–English translation pairs as being more similar and translated German words correctly more often than participants who did not receive pronunciation information. We also report the relationships among word frequency, rated imageability and the performance measures. The resulting database of information is intended to be a resource for researchers interested in cognitive processing in German–English bilinguals.

The representation of "false cognates" in the bilingual lexicon.

The results of repetition priming studies with homographs such as BANK suggest that semantic constraints restrict priming to the specific meaning invoked during the study phase. Cross-language priming studies with "false cognates" (words with similar form but unrelated meanings) suggest that form similarity may be sufficient to support repetition priming, and they do not therefore support this claim. The relevant studies have used language cues (e.g., seeing the word ESTATE in the context of other Italian words) as distinct from semantic cues (e.g., INVERNO-ESTATE) to constrain meaning, however, so that interpretation is correspondingly uncertain. The experiment described in this paper was designed to answer this question: Does sequential exposure to the English word pair MANOR-ESTATE during the study phase facilitate lexical decision to the second of these words during sequential exposure to the Italian word pair INVERNO-ESTATE (i.e., winter-summer) during the test phase of the experiment? In the experiment reported below, interpretation of false cognates was constrained by meaning rather than language, and cross-language repetition priming was eliminated for false cognates. The results suggest that lexical representation in bilinguals is organized along morphological lines rather than by language.

Privileging the past: reconstructing history in Northwest Coast art

Foreword by Nelson Graburn Preface Introduction 1. Expedience and Classicism at the Chief Shakes Community House 2. The Map and the Territory in the Grand Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization 3. Making Dance History: Kwakwaka'wakw Performance Art at the American Museum of Natural History . False Cognates: Looking Backward at the Latest Thing in Contemporary Northwest Coast Art 5. The Style in Which They Were Imagined Notes References Index

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Factors that Contribute To the Difficulty of Learning False Cognates1

ABSTRACT The difficulty posed by false cognates stems largely from two sources: intrinsic factors (inherently confusing characteristics of false cognates themselves) and extrinsic factors (ambiguous, contradictory, and sometimes incorrect input). This article identifies and discusses ten factors that contribute to the difficulties that language learners may have in dealing with false cognates and provides suggestions for minimizing the confusion. The terms “reliably false cognates” and “unreliably false cognates” are proposed to differentiate the false cognates that never have overlapping meanings from those that have both false and true cognate meanings.

Changing lexical features in Puerto Rican English

ABSTRACT: In order to understand what happens when languages are in contact in a community, it is necessary to observe that community's acceptance or rejection of the changes that are occurring. Lexicon is the logical area for this analysis since of all the components of language, it changes the fastest. The present study of language contact in Puerto Rico found that the degree of acceptance of lexical change in English due to contact is dependent not only on the type of lexical deviance from established norms but also on the speakers’ self‐evaluation of language dominance. Four types of lexical deviance arising from languge contact were identified: deceptive cognates, false cognates, accidentally similar cognates and accidentally created cognates. Of these, deceptive cognates had the highest percentage of acceptance. The findings indicate that the lexical characteristics of this new contact variety of English, Puerto Rican English, are determined by the particular type of lexical deviance interacting with the linguistic self‐evaluation of the speakers.

Problematic ESL Content Word Choice in Writing: A Proposed Foundation of Descriptive Categories

Accurate and native-like word choice in writing is an important but problematic area of second language use. This paper presents an analytic foundation for pedagogical research and application which extends beyond the traditional 'superficial' categories of morphosyntactic rule violations and false cognates. Simultaneous 'complementary' analytic categories are proposed: the complexity of understanding word choice in written production entails the incorporation of several relevant theoretical and applied perspectives: lexical-semantics, syntax, text-analysis, pragmatics, language acquisition, cognition and memory, and pedagogical research. This study focuses on the first four as a necessary preliminary step. Major categories of word choice analysis are synthesized from both a theoretical perspective and from an empirical one, with an examination of data from ESL writers. The paper goes on to discuss implications for ESL pedagogy and further research.

Cognate recognition: Its importance in the teaching of ESP reading courses to Spanish speakers

The concepts of cognate and false cognate are defined with reference to etymological considerations, reserving the term false friend for semantic problems. The importance of cognates as a language teaching/learning tool is considered, with special reference to the frequency of cognates in technical texts and their use as a vocabulary development strategy. Four problem areas are identified, namely: (a) low level of cognate recognition, (b) homonyms, (c) false cognates and false friends, and (d) the haphazard nature of cognate teaching. Analysis is made of a corpus of approximately 1500 English/Spanish cognates obtained from articles chosen at random from those journals most frequently consulted by students of computer science, engineering, and medicine, in order to ensure a representative sample of those cognates actually encountered by students in their daily reading activities. The cognates in the corpus are classified according to the following orthographical criteria: (a) individual letter equivalences, (b) position of differences, (c) vowel/consonant groups, and (d) part of speech. Results are given of tests administered to students at different levels to evaluate their ability to recognise and interpret cognates belonging to the classes established during the analysis of the corpus. It is suggested that teachers should adopt, as a regular part of class activities, a strategy of structured and graded practice in cognate recognition based on the analysis of the corpus and recognition tests.

Marcel Proust: Selected Letters. Volume 2, 1904-1909 , and: Proust and Venice (review)

Reviewed by: Marcel Proust: Selected Letters. Volume 2, 1904-1909, and: Proust and Venice Laurence M. Porter Philip Kolb , ed. Marcel Proust: Selected Letters. Volume 2, 1904-1909. Trans. Terence Kilmartin. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 482 pp. $23.95. Peter Collier . Proust and Venice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 185 pp. $39.50. A survey of professors of French literature conducted by the Modern Language Association about a decade ago indicated that more of these scholars—well over 500—considered themselves specialists in Proust than in any other French author. The publication of Proust's letters in English (the first volume appeared in 1983 with Doubleday, translated by Ralph Manheim) raises two issues: of how much interest is Proust to students of national literatures other than French, and how [End Page 634] great is the intrinsic interest of Proust's correspondence? Despite an abundance of excellent criticism in English (such as Roger Shattuck's masterful overview, Marcel Proust, in 1974) devoted to this author, Proust has remained an isolated monument, considered as a belated nineteenth-century author whose novel is too long to teach except in a seminar; who is inaccessible to most undergraduates; who exerted little discernible influence on later writers; and who was outdone by James Joyce. Such a climate of opinion obviously affords rich opportunities for revision. The short story, "La Confession d'une jeune fille," for example, is eminently teachable. But the letters do a disservice to Proust's reputation, for they were definitely not written for publication. Critics have outgrown their early disappointment or embarrassment at finding in Proust the correspondent a social-climbing sycophant who awkwardly concealed his homosexuality and who maintained relations with anti-Semitic journals in hopes of being published, although his mother was Jewish. Nevertheless, these letters from the period during which Proust was discovering his artistic vocation are tediously preoccupied with his asthma (a convenient excuse for evading social obligations and visits). He flaunts his illness as Woody Allen flaunts his neurosis but without ever managing to exploit it as a source of humor. He focuses almost entirely on maintaining emotional relations with others, on expressing feelings and clearing up misunderstandings. The tone often is effusive and rhapsodic. Apart from aesthetic objects and high society, the external world scarcely makes itself felt. Topical Belle Epoque gossip predominates. Proust is at his most interesting (in this particular period) when he talks about Ruskin or reacts to the creative and critical works authors send to him. He keeps the elaboration of his novel to himself, jealously guarding his privacy even from intimates. As he wrote to Georges de Lauris late in 1909, "There will be time enough when my thoughts have run their course to allow free rein to the stupidity of others." Philip Kolb has been publishing his definitive edition of Proust's correspondence with Plon since 1970. Fifteen volumes have so far appeared and six more should complete the set. Proust wrote about one letter every other day. Thirty per cent of these have been preserved in the English version. Both editions contain ample notes identifying persons referred to, suggesting sources for À la recherche du temps perdu in Proust's social experience and providing cross-references to other letters. The French edition adds to the scholarly apparatus notations of the kind of paper on which the letters were written; details about the forms of dating and about miswritings; references to studies by other scholars; quotations from poems to which Proust refers; and the facts of publication of the books he mentions. Baudelaire, Hugo, Maeterlinck, Montesquieu, Anna de Noailles, Racine, Ruskin, and the painter Whistler predominate. The notes are impressively erudite. The selection and translation of the letters are uninspired. In a sampling of the eleven letters (of twenty-three) chosen from January 1907 (the numbers refer to the numbers of the letters in the English), three should have been omitted because they are routine congratulations (180, 184) or thanks (182). The last two lines of a post-scriptum are silently omitted (175). Italics (to indicate a colloquial expression) are omitted (175), and the punctuation is changed on four other occasions. False cognates are literally translated: invite becomes "invitation" rather than...

Language and Cultural Characteristics That Explain Differential Item Functioning for Hispanic Examinees on the Scholastic Aptitude Test

The standardization methodology was used to help identify item characteristics that might explain differential item functioning among Hispanics on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Results indicated that true cognates or words with a common root in English and Spanish and content of special interest for Hispanics seemed to help Hispanics performance. Limited occurrence of false cognates (words that appear to be cognates but have different meanings in both languages) and of homographs (words that are spelled alike but have different meanings in English) restricted their evaluation. Nevertheless, examination of items with false cognates or homographs gave some evidence indicating that their occurrence might make items unexpectedly more difficult for Hispanic examinees

Neruda in English: The Controversy Over Translation Poetics

NERUDA IN ENGLISH: THE CONTROVERSY OVER TRANSLATION POETICS / Jonathan Cohen THE POETRY of Pablo Neruda has been appearing in English translation since the mid-thirties. By now, to be sure, he is one of the most widely translated of all modern poets; in fact, such a poem as "Walking Around," originally published in 1935, has appeared in no fewer than twelve different English versions. The controversy surrounding the poetics of Neruda translation has proliferated along with the translations. By examining the various issues behind this controversy we can see why Neruda's many translators have created different, even conflicting, impressions of his poetry, and why translation is bound to generate controversy. The early translators of Neruda, working in the thirties and forties, were more interested in the original Spanish than in their English versions of it. These scholars, usually professors of Romance languages, were primarily interested in understanding what Neruda had said, and so they tended to employ a literalist approach. In 1934, in the preface to his translations, G. Dundas Craig explained: In making the translations, I have tried to steer a middle course between the literal prose translation and the poetic paraphrase. Undoubtedly, the prose translation gives the closest approximation to the poet's meaning . . . The modern poet — and particularly the Parnassian — insists ... on the music of his verse; and it is but fair that the translator should attempt to reproduce some of the effect at which the poet aimed. The poetic paraphrase, however . . . demands of the translator an endowment of poetic genius to which I can make no claim.1 Craig was reluctant to inject Neruda with his own peculiarities; he felt they would only obscure Neruda's personality. So, for example, in his translation of "Maestranzas de noche" ("Machine Shops at Night"), one of Neruda's earliest poems of social protest, Craig burdened the English with clumsy Latinate words, even false cognates, and followed the Spanish word order slavishly. The opening lines of the original poem are: Fierro negro que duerme, fierro negro que gime por cada poro un grito de desconsolación.2 Craig translated them this way: 176 · The Missouri Review Black iron sleeping, iron black that groans through every pore with moans disconsolate.3 As a result, though he hoped to retain the rhythmical and musical qualities of the original Spanish, Craig obscured the poetry in his use of English. He hoped to capture Neruda's poetic spirit in a translation which tended towards metaphrase, but failed because he did not effectively construct the proper body of words in which the spirit could reside. Like Craig, Dudley Fitts preferred a bilingual format, as in his Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry (1942), which presented translations designed to help the English-language reader enjoy the original poems in Spanish. He believed that any reader interested in so special a work as poetry from Latin America would not be entirely illiterate in foreign languages, so he insisted on literal versions which would not be poetry, "except accidentally." Reflecting on his theory of translation, Fitts later concluded ". . .a translation must fail to the extent that it leaves unaccounted for whatever aspects of the original it is unable to handle." Fitts was referring to such aspects as "nuances of diction, of sound, of tone, that make any good poem a discrete experience, an entity somehow different from any other good poem ever written."4 Fitts' early method steered the translator toward metaphrase and away from poetic paraphrase. For example, his translation of Neruda's "Ritual de mis piernas" ("Ritual of My Legs"), a poem in which Neruda expressed his pained sense of separation from the natural world, closes with the following lines: Siempre, productos manufacturados, medias, zapatos, o simplemente aire infinito, habrá entre mis pies y la tierra, extremando lo aislado y lo solitario de mi ser, algo tenazmente supuesto entre mi vida y la tierra, algo abiertamente invencible y enemigo.5 Fitts translated them as follows: Always, manufactured articles, hose, shoes, or simply infinite air, will come between my feet and the earth, intensifying what is isolated and solitary in my being, something doggedly thrust between my life and the earth, something clearly unconquerable and hostile...

Think It Gooder

Which would you rather hear: a Haydn quartet on the car radio, low fidelity, marred by static or discordant, computer-composed, Moog-performed noise through four perfectly balanced exponential speakers with all the tweeters and woofers, cycles and overtones just where they were intended to be? Me, I'll take Haydn. The beauty of sound is an important part of the musical whole: even Haydn is better with high-fidelity reproduction than with static. To have the sound clear and appropriate and correct is important for many reasons. The sound is, to begin with, not only the medium by which the artistic message is transmitted, but it itself is, in fact, a part of the message; if it is unclear, a part of the message is lost. The artistic compatibility of the sound and the composition, the appropriateness of the sound, is important because it puts and keeps the listener in touch with a cultural heritage. (Would the Mozart posthorn serenade sound right on a cimbalom?) And at least one psychological reason why the correctness of sound is important is that its absence is distracting it disturbs the listener's concentration on essentials and subliminally shakes his faith in the validity of the work as a whole. I mean to be drawing an analogy: music is mathematics, and static is bad diction, bad syntax, bad style. Intended conclusion: good language is important in the exposition of mathematics, but, just as in music, it is nowhere near so important as the intrinsic beauty of what's being said. The first duty of one who would communicate mathematics is to offer plausible motivations and unambiguous statements, appropriately organized and convincingly proved. Surprise: it can be done, all of it, with misspelled (or misused) false cognates, in mispunctuated (or mispronounced) sentences, with the number of the verb failing to agree with that of the noun, and with attributive adjectives predicatively used. It shouldn't be done that way, but it can come out sounding like a Haydn quartet just the same, marred by static, to be sure. Some editors insist that good mathematical communication means good diction and good grammar, and hardly anything else. I disagree. I remember the time when after a lecture in Moscow I found myself at the blackboard having an excited, detailed, complicated, and rewarding mathematical conversation with a member of the audience. It was only after we were finished, and both my newly found friend and I knew more about weighted shifts than we knew before, that I realized that we had no language in common. I could speak a hundred words of Russian (mainly having to do with breakfast), and my friend had somewhat less English than that. No matter by writing symbols on the board, by saying the crucial nominatives and infinitives loudly, and being forced to arrange our thoughts in nearly perfect order, we could overcome the obstacle of our lexical, syntactic, and stylistic deficiences.

Mixed and Misbegotten Metaphors: Text as Translation as Text

A malformed skeleton rationalized as idiosyncratic, its syntax-a faulty guaranteel-conforms uncomfortably to convoluted constructions, its weight cautiously distributed to reduce stress on fragile approximations, while strenuously compensating for center of gravity displaced by flaying participles, each movement painful reminder of its pock-marked topography of pores and pimples from irregularities in register, uncertain of its decisions, anticipating with anxiety the embarrassment of having succumbed to false cognates, it continues to stare into the mirror, transfixed by its inverse: the perfected symmetry of its reflection: the imago with which it-the bastard off-spring of its own twin in the mirror-must ever and can never identify. Or else it is the flawed reflection in a mirror carried along frontier, grotesque double, doppelglinger distorted by imperfections in freak show glass. Something has been lost in the translation, but that is its fate: destined ever to be translation of, tentative approximation of, vehicle for the broader dissemination of, its only consolation is that, unlike its model, it can undergo successive avatars designed to reduce the gap which separates it from the work, asymptotically strain towards union which can never be consummated, an absolutely elusive identity. Haunted by divinity's perverse injunction: Create yourself in my own image-its