Abstract:

Romance  languages  share a considerable  number of words with the same or similar  spelling  and meaning.  Although  these  can help  the translator,  he/she  needs to pay attention  to those words which appear similar – often sharing the same etymology– but which  have  different  meaning  in all contexts,  or in just  one  special context.  When  translating  from  Italian  or  Portuguese  to  Spanish  or  vice  versa,  a large number of terms can cause problems because they prove to be false friends in the two languages.  In this article, we aim to cover aspects of false friends between these  related  languages  and  study  their  influence  in the  translation  process.  In the first part, we analyse  the principal  studies  of the typology of false friends  between Spanish-Italian  and Spanish-Portuguese.  In the second part, a proposal for the taxo- nomy of false friends is offered, and some problems arising from overgeneralization about the use of false cognates  are highlighted.

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