The Pregnant Nun and Other False Cognate Translations
High school Spanish teachers amuse their students with the story of a hapless American nun, who addressed a Spanish-speaking audience with the words: "Estoy embarazada…"? In Spanish, this innocent expression means "I am pregnant”, which certainly wasn’t what the speaker wanted to convey.
The countless word pairs in related languages with similar form but different meaning, such as the English/Spanish "embarrassed/embarazada", are called "false cognates". They represent a huge challenge not only to Spanish teachers, but also to businesses that must communicate clearly.
Fabric is not fabrica
If "religion" (English), and "religión" (Spanish) mean more or less the same thing, this doesn’t help deciding whether "fabric" and "fábrica" share their meaning too (they don’t, "fábrica" meaning "factory"). The Spanish "goma" can be compared to the English gum in certain contexts, but it would be incorrect to call "goma" the chewing gum (it is "chicle"), or "gomas" the teeth gums (the correct word is "encías").
Spanish speakers, on the other hand, sometimes are tempted to call car tires "gums", directly translating from their common Spanish “gomas”. For the same reason, "grande" is not "grand"; "genial" (Sp.) is not "genial" (Engl.), and "antiguo" is not "antique."
False cognates are dangerous for multinational companies
These false cognates often represent the result of a divergence in meaning between words originally identical; sometimes, though, they are generated by a distorted loan.
The English "guerrilla", a recent loan from Spanish, has acquired the meaning "rebel fighter, insurgent, revolutionary," even though in its language of origin it denotes a specific warfare practice, or the group practicing it. The Spanish word corresponding to the English guerrilla is "guerrillero".
For a company doing multilanguage translation of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or marketing materials, false cognates can be dangerous, even actionable. The answer: certified multilanguage translations from a translation service like SRF Global Translations.
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