False Friends in Terminology: Croatian Lost in Translation

Abstract

Every terminology system strives to be as systematic as possible and able to eliminate system errors. In the context of error identification, it is more than obvious that linguistic errors, apart from other system errors, occur quite frequently. This paper is focused on the linguistic and translation phenomenon of false friends, especially as a potentially threatening cause of misunderstanding between two terminological systems. The European Union has also addressed this problem to some extent, primarily because of the huge amount of documents translated on a daily basis. This paper analyses 25 corpus-based pairs of Croatian-English false friends and gives recommendations on how to avoid terminological false friends in translation.

Keywords

• false friends
• terminology
• translation
• Croatian
• English