“True friends” in the teaching and practice of translation

Abstract

The article attempts at filling the gap in the linguistic research of the phenomenon “true friends of the translator”, i.e. word pairs in two languages, which are identical or so similar that it is possible to construct a word equivalent in one language as an analogy to the word form in the other. The author analyses the occurrence of these words in translations of popular and special texts (Polish and German) as well as factors allowing to distinguish between “true“ and “false friends“. Apart from formal differences, e.g. distinct genus, numerus, different word formation morphemes and significant irregularities in pronunciation and orthography, differences may concern semantics, pragmatics and stylistics of lexemes. If the word equivalent in one language has more or different meanings than it does in the other language, it is called a tautonym (Lipczuk 1985 et al). The pragmatic and stylistic differences consider the distinct usage of lexemes with similar meanings in particular languages. For example, English and German lexemes syntactic/ syntaktisch are used in standard and specialist communication, whereas the Polish adjective syntaktyczny occurs in special linguistic language and the other adjective, składniowy, rather in standard language. Most false and true friends are internationalisms; many of them come from specialist terminologies although they have become a part of standard vocabulary and are present in universal bilingual dictionaries. The author presents her own dictionary project that aims to collect the true friends of the translator in Polish and German and to lemmatize them in a dictionary not only in their specific meanings but also in authentic contexts. These efforts are to support teaching and practice of translation.