Similar but different: a study of french-english false friends, their translation process and underlying issues

Abstract

Among the difficulties that EFL learners encounter during their translation process is false friends. The present study emphasizes English-French false friends, their translation and the considerable issues they cause to second year students of English at Abderrahmane Mira University, Bejaia. It aims at identifying learners’ errors regarding false friends during their English-French or French-English translation process and highlighting the considerable issues that they face during process in order to make them aware of this issue. Two translation tests were conducted with 30 participants in addition to an interview which was carried out with 3 of them in order to collect data, the data collected was analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. After analyzing the data, the results revealed that second year students of English at Abderrahmane Mira University are less aware of the issue of false friends which is considered as a major problem for most of them when translating from English to French or vice versa, thus, it prevents them from producing an accurate translation