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

Abstract

This paper examines the difficulties faced by students at various non-linguistic universities when translating English pseudo-international words (“false friends”) into Russian in economic texts. Variants of incorrect interpretation are based on the use of loan translation and the incorrect meanings of lexical units – “false friends”. The aim of the research is to systematise the most frequent pseudo-international words related to financial and economic vocabulary by parts of speech based on the information received from students, as well as to identify typical errors, the study of which could further improve the quality of text translation. The classification of “false friends” presented in the paper made it possible to identify four parts of speech characteristic of pseudo-international words of economic subjects arranged in descending order of the number of incorrectly translated words: nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. The scientific novelty of the work lies in taking a comprehensive approach to the problems of “false friends” translation and classification of pseudo-international words of economic subjects not only by their lexical meaning, but also by the grammatical classes of parts of speech. The linguistically relevant research findings amount to identifying the parts of speech of pseudo-international words that cause the greatest difficulties in translation. The work is carried out using the material of the English language.