False friends: words that trick a translator
Arabic · Key Stage 3 · The School
What a false friend is
A FALSE FRIEND is a word in one language that resembles a word in another, in sound or spelling, but means something different. The resemblance is a coincidence, or a shared distant history that has since drifted apart in meaning — either way, it is not a reliable guide to the actual meaning today.
An Arabic-English example
The Arabic word حَظّ (ḥaẓẓ) means "luck" or "fortune". An English speaker learning Arabic might associate it, purely by sound, with the English word "hazard" — which carries a negative sense of danger or risk. The two words share no real meaning connection at all; the resemblance is coincidence, and trusting it would produce a wrong translation.
Why context should decide, not resemblance
When a word looks familiar, check whether the surrounding sentence actually supports the meaning the resemblance suggests. If it does not fit, trust the context and look the word up properly, rather than trusting a surface resemblance that may be entirely coincidental.
حَظُّهُ فِي الِامْتِحَانِ كَانَ جَيِّدًا. A translator relying on the "hazard" resemblance might guess something about danger or risk in an exam — entirely the wrong direction. Reading the sentence in context, جَيِّدًا means "good", and the sentence plainly reads as praise, not warning. The correct translation is "His luck in the exam was good" — meaning things went well for him. Checking that the resemblance-based guess (something negative, about danger) actually fits the rest of the sentence (which is clearly positive) is what catches the error before it is written down.