Familiar and False: A Study of English–Albanian False Friends Across Two Translation Directions

As false friends pose recurring challenges to vocabulary acquisition, this bidirectional study aims to analyze the correlation between the variables of translation direction and self-assessment with false-friend errors. For the purposes of this study, students performed a translation task in both translation directions. Additionally, students were asked to provide a self-evaluation after completing the task. The results highlighted that translation direction plays a minor role in the occurrence of false-friend errors and that performance inaccuracies are associated with high levels of self-reported confidence. Therefore, through presenting a list of 35 full false friends shared between Albanian and English, the study aims to emphasize the importance of targeted contrastive analysis in moderating the effects of deceptive surface similarity.