Session 2, Activity 3 (French)
Activity 3 French – recognising false friends
Follow the steps below.
Step 1
Read the French text created by AI using the prompt ‘Create a short French text with false friends’ and identify any words that look similar in English, i.e. any possible false friends.
Actuellement, je travaille sur un projet pour le collège de ma ville. Nous voulons rénover la bibliothèque pour les étudiants. Chaque journée, je vais voir les travaux. Parfois, il faut attendre longtemps pour que les matériaux arrivent. Cela peut être ennuyeux, mais c'est important.
Éventuellement, tout sera prêt et les étudiants auront une belle bibliothèque. Un jour, il y a eu un problème. Un ouvrier a pensé qu'une remarque était une injure. Heureusement, nous avons réglé le problème rapidement avec une attitude sympathique.
Nous avons aussi discuté de la location de nouveaux meubles pour la bibliothèque. Il faut choisir des meubles confortables et jolis. Nous devons aussi être sensibles aux besoins des étudiants, avec des espaces de travail adaptés.
Je suis sûr que ce projet sera très bénéfique pour l'école. Actuellement, tout le monde travaille dur et je suis impatient de voir le résultat final.
Step 2
Input the French text into your chosen OMT and translate into English.
Step 3
Compare the machine translation with the French original. Focus on the false friends – are there any mistakes in the translated English text?
Step 4
- Reflect on the context and meaning of each false friend.
- Where does the machine translation need improvement?
Step 5
Now translate the false friends you have found between French and English into either German or Spanish. Do they also pose problems in other languages?
E.g. eventuell in German has a similar meaning in French (definition ‘maybe’), but not in English (definition ‘finally’)
Reflection
How can multilingual competence help you to enhance your ‘feel for the language’, i.e. your deeper understanding of how languages work?
In the reveal section below you will find some sample idioms and translations from the text. You may have found different idioms or different translations to those given.
Discussion
False friends, or false cognates, are words in two languages that look or sound similar but have different meanings. They can easily lead to misunderstandings and mistakes in translation or language learning because they appear to be equivalent in both languages but are not.
Machine translation can be a useful tool in addressing the challenges posed by false friends in language learning and translation. It can help you identify potential false friends by highlighting translations that do not fit the context. For example, it can show when a word that looks similar in both languages results in an incorrect or nonsensical translation. In summary, OMT helps you to recognise, understand, and correctly use false friends by providing context-aware translations and immediate feedback.
Examples from the text:
- actuellement – French: currently; English: actually (in fact)
- college – French: middle school; English: college
- attendre – French: to wait; English: to attend
- éventuellement – French: possibly; English: eventually, finally
- journée – French: day; English: journey
- location – French: rental; English: place
- sensible – French: sensitive; English: sensible
- sympathique – French: nice, friendly; English: showing compassion.
Extension activities
- Consider how false friends can affect understanding and communication.
- Reflect on the limitations of machine translation when dealing with false friends, and the strategies you could implement to improve translation accuracy.
- You can extend your multilingual skills by using the idioms and metaphors identified in the German reading activity and translate them into French and Spanish. Can you think of any English metaphors or idioms that translate well into other languages? Make some notes in the box below.
- Like French, Italian also has a lot of false friends. Input the following Italian nouns into OMT for an English translation: fabbrica, parente, libreria, camera. What do you notice?
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