“False Friends” Phenomenon in Translation and Analysis of Its Causes.docVIP

“False Friends” Phenomenon in Translation and Analysis of Its Causes Ⅰ. Introduction Both English and Chinese are highly-developed languages and they both have abundant words and expressions of their own. However, they belong to different language systems, English belongs to Indo-European language family and Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family. So there are numerous differences in their usage of words and sentence structures. When translation is concerned, these differences tend to cause many difficulties in understanding. “False friends” phenomenon is one of them. Mona Bake has made this definition: “False friends” are words or expressions which have the same form in two or more languages but convey different meanings. Professor Lin points out in Translation Guide: “False friends” or “False cognate”, refers to the same or similar form of two languages, which, however, have different meanings. In translational category, “false friends” phenomenon can be extended to incorrect translation caused by being taken for granted subjectively. It is extremely important for English learners to distinguish “false friends” because this phenomenon causes much misunderstanding and incorrect translation. Therefore, the writer of the thesis chooses this topic to write. This thesis describes “false friends” phenomenon in English-Chinese translation at both lexical level and sentence level with plenty of examples. Furthermore, it analyses the causes of the phenomenon from social, cultural and other aspects. Ⅱ. Two Levels of “False Friends” in Translation 2.1 “False Friends” at Lexical Level When it comes to the relationship between culture and language elements, the most influent is lexical element. Lexicon is the fundamental element of language. It is the pillar for the existence of language system. Therefore, “false friends” at lexical level appears to be more prominent and widespread, including nouns, noun phrases and idioms. For example, when we come across the word “b