Research into linguistic interference

 
4.2.1.  Lexical Interference  
Lexical interference occurs on the level of words. It includes mainly 
interferences caused by incorrect or inappropriate direct translation of a 
concept. Lexical interference includes four types of occurrence. What first 
comes to everyone‟s mind when thinking about lexical interference are probably 
false friends (also called false cognates or faux amis). Virtually, all of the 

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researchers and scholars mentioned in chapter 3 dealt with this type because it 
is one of the most evident lexical interferences. The second type of lexical 
interference consists in mistakes which very often arise because the students 
fail to consider the polysemous character of a word and their choice from all the 
possible meanings is inappropriate. The third lexical feature which causes 
interferences on this level is the lack of ability to express a concept using more 
words in the target when necessary (lexicalizable strings as denominated by 
Brenda Malkiel). And the last subcategory of lexical interference is the case of a 
literal translation of an idiom or a collocation. Just to make this clear, this 
typology has been developed during the actual analyses of the texts and it has 
been created according to the concrete examples which appeared in the 
corpus. Of course, the classifications presented in chapter 3 served as a basis 
for this typology. In the following paragraphs, these types will be described and 
we will give several examples of each. 
In short, false friends are words which have a similar form in the two 
languages but their meaning is not always the same, in other words, they 
cannot be translated by sound. Kussmaul confirms this by saying that “notorious 
candidates for causing this type of error are „false friends‟” (Kussmaul 1995:15) 
and particularly false friends are the elements which, according to him, cause 
serious mistakes in translations. Brenda Malkiel says that false friends are “a 
recurrent source of word-level interference” (Malkiel 2006: 340). When a literally 
translated false friend occurs in a translation, especially in cases of less 
experienced translators, it is likely that the subject did not recognize it at first 
sight and, thus, translated it subconsciously using a formally similar word. 
Kussmaul works with TAP protocols and confirms this claim: “Interferences of 

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this type arise spontaneously and without any comment, which shows that the 
problem was not realized at all” (Kussmaul 1995: 16). It is obvious that 
translating a potential false friend requires conscious reflection and translators 
need to make sure what the correct equivalent in the target language is. 
Nevertheless, Kussmaul states that the fear of interference is sometimes 
exaggerated and more experienced translators become increasingly afraid of 
literal translation of formally similar words. He adds that “there are two types [of 
formally corresponding words]: those which always turn out to be false friends, 
and those which can sometimes be good friends” (Kussmaul 1995: 15). As has 
already been mentioned above, when coming across a “good friend”, translators 
sometimes automatically translate it by another expression to avoid potential 
error. They decide so without considering the meaning of such a word in the 
given context because this choice is considered as a safer solution.  
“These words are problems even when translators have already switched 
to reflection, for they have to decide if the formally corresponding word is 
the correct translation or if they must look for a formally non-
corresponding expression, a decision which sometimes requires a 
detailed semantic analysis of the context. Semantically speaking, the 
problem is caused by polysemy. One of the meanings of these words, 
but not all, can be translated by formally corresponding TL-word.” 
(Kussmaul 1995: 16) 
 
In the corpus, I did not find many examples of this phenomenon because not 
many good friends actually appeared there. Nevertheless, I have come across 
two examples of good friends in the source texts but “the safer solution” was 
incorrect, in this case. One student wanted to avoid the formally equivalent 
translation of collateral damage because she probably felt that a problem could 
occur. She decided to use the Czech expression přídružné škody although 
kolaterální škody would be more appropriate. She thought that she chose the 

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safer path but her solution was inappropriate, indeed. A similar example 
occurred in the expression fantasy author translated as spisovatel fantasy 
literatury. For some reason, the student used a formally non-equivalent word 
although autor fantasy would sound much better. 
The following table shows at least some examples of literal translations of 
false friends from the corpus: