On Translation Strategies Of "False Friends" In English And Chinese

The phenomenon of false friends is well-known to translators. They are just likesome traps which make the translators confused. As unprofessional translators, thestudent translators are limited in translation abilities and skills. They may encountersuch lions in the way. Without careful study of the original text, a translator wouldchoose an equivalent expression in the target language in his own conceit. This is mostlikely a trap by false friends. The mistranslation like this is difficult to detect.“Falsefriends” can not only be found in languages sharing the similar history and culture, andsocial customs, but also in languages irrelevant from each other. Taking English andChinese for example, they belong to different language systems and diverse in culturalbackground and customs, but there are many “false friends” between them. Theirexistences can not only increase the difficulties of translation, but also influence thetranslators’ abilities. Research on “false friends” will help the translators to betterunderstand the source text, improve their translation abilities and guarantee thetranslation quality.The thesis attempts to explore the following three research questions:(1) Whattypes of false friends are there in English and Chinese?(2) What translation strategiesshould be adopted in dealing with false friends?(3) What should a translator do toavoid mistranslation caused by false friends? In order to achieve the research target,this paper mainly uses descriptive methodology. Taking the self-translated “MyRelations” and “Duke University Commencement Speech” as the cases, the papercarries on the research from the causes of false friends, the classification of falsefriends and translation strategies of false friends. Through the case study, the paperfigures out that the majority of “false friends” in English and Chinese are at the lexiconlevel and they can be classified into false friends caused by word to word translation,polysemy phenomenon, cultural words and back borrowing. With regard to these kindsof false friends, the author adopts the translation strategies of Foreignization,Domestication and Free translation in self-translated materials. In the last part, thepaper presents some pertinent suggestions in order to avoid mistranslation caused byfalse friends. A translator should, firstly, identify false friends according to the context,and then cultivate cross-cultural translating perspective. At last, he should establishand make good use of the corpora of false friends.