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False friends: English and French

English took tens of thousands of French and Latin words after 1066 and in the learned centuries since, and French has taken English words for two hundred years. Most of them still mean what they meant; enough have drifted to make English–French the textbook pair of false friends. The drift goes both ways: actual moved from "acting, in act" to "real" in English, while actuel moved to "present" in French; library kept the place of books and librairie became the shop. This manual lists the traps of both directions by domain, most frequent first, with what the corpora show translators did. The method and the columns are described in the folder README; the general rules in general.md §5; the English–French pair manual is pairs/en-fr.md, and the renderings that depend on context are in context/en-fr.md.

Data and method

Counts were made on 2026-11-06 with parallel choices (tools/parallel) over the English–French corpora in en-fr: Tatoeba (442 011 pairs), Europarl v8 (2 051 014), DGT-TM v2021 (5 679 514), the Gutenberg book pairs with identified translators (32 321) and the WEB–Louis Segond Bible (29 001), all quotable; EMEA (medicine), JRC-Acquis (EU law) and ECB (banking) were counted but are never quoted. For each entry the line Corpora gives the number of sentence pairs with the source word, and among them those with a recommended rendering and those with the look-alike. These are co-occurrence counts: the look-alike in the same sentence pair may be another word's translation. Europarl and DGT are EU institutional language, translated by professionals, often from a third language; Tatoeba is short everyday sentences.

The list has 362 entries: 185 English → French and 177 French → English. The tool picked an example for 360 of them; all 360 were read by eye on 2026-11-06. Six picks were replaced: two where the recommended French word was there but did not render the English one (assist shown through aide en faveur de; facilité in the verb aurait facilité), one where the pattern caught a noun instead of the verb (adresse for adresser, pattern tightened), two DGT rows with placeholder characters (file, surname; the tool now refuses such rows), and jurisprudence, given a Europarl row. One pick was removed (eventual: the French row had ultime, a poor rendering). The list also showed one entry wrong as first written: in EU English jurisprudence means case law, as in French, in 418 of the 439 sentence pairs, and the entry was rewritten as a partial false friend. Two entries have no corpus example (eventual, bachelier).

Examples marked ✓ with an id are corpus rows, picked by the tool and read by eye; the ✗ renderings in the notes are constructed. Entries with no corpus example are queued for our own example sentences, to be translated later by the Codex teachers (Terra for plain entries, Sol for hard ones) and gated before use (README §3); none has been made yet.

1. Everyday words

The everyday traps are the classic ones of the classroom: adverbs of time and truth (actually, eventually), places (library, location, cave), and adjectives of character (sensible, sympathetic, rude, gentle). Professional translators rarely fall into them; machine translation and hurried writing do, and the result is a grammatical sentence with the wrong meaning, which only a reading of the target alone reveals.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=everyday src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

The reverse traps include the interlingual homographs (car, four, chair, main, pain), harmless for a human, dangerous for a system that copies unknown words.

<!-- entries domain=everyday src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

2. Academic and scientific words

University systems do not map: college, faculty, lecture, lecturer, grade, degree, dissertation all name things that exist in French under other names, while the French look-alikes name other stages of the system (collège is a school for 11–15-year-olds, dissertation an essay). Academic writing adds the verbs of argument (argue, assume) and the words for evidence.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=academic src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=academic src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

3. Law and the European Union

Legal false friends are the costly ones: a provision that becomes a provision (a reserve), a jurisdiction that becomes a court, prejudice that becomes harm. In EU texts the institutions have fixed many renderings, and the term base decides before any dictionary: Regulation is règlement, without prejudice to is sans préjudice de, a facility in a financial instrument stays facilité. Check IATE and the EUR-Lex bilingual view of an earlier act before choosing.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=law-eu src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=law-eu src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

4. Medicine

In medicine the traps change a dose or a product: drug is usually médicament, not drogue; preservative is conservateur; injury is blessure. EMEA, the European Medicines Agency's corpus, was counted for these entries but is not quoted.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=medicine src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=medicine src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

5. Information technology

French IT jargon borrows English freely (data, digital, implémenter, librairie for a code library); the norm and the official terminology prefer native terms (données, numérique, mettre en œuvre, bibliothèque). Which to use is a register decision (into-fr.md §4): a developers' forum and a ministry's text differ. The French traitement des données is data processing, not treatment.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=it src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=it src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

6. Politics

Political vocabulary carries national systems with it: an American liberal is not a French libéral, a British Secretary is a minister, a cabinet is a government in London and a minister's private office in Paris, a député is a Member. Parliamentary verbs (support, address, involve, resume) are frequent in Europarl, and the counts show which look-alikes EU French has adopted.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=politics src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=politics src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

7. Economy and finance

Numbers are the critical case: French billion is 10¹², English billion is milliard; a wrong figure is a critical error in any quality model (general manual §11). Accounting and tax words split differently (impôt / taxe, bénéfice / prestation, recettes / revenu), and company words follow the legal form (société, not compagnie, for most companies).

English → French

<!-- entries domain=economy src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=economy src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

8. Grammatical false friends and calques

Some traps are not in single words but in grammar: countability (des informations, des conseils, des progrès are plural in French and uncountable in English), prepositions and transitivity (dépendre de, penser à, répondre à, attendre without pour), aspect (the English present perfect of a state that still holds is a French present with depuis), and calques of construction, phrases translated part by part (avoir lieu → ✗ have place; at the end of the day → ✗ à la fin de la journée). French grammatical gender has no English counterpart to mislead, so the gender traps of this folder are in the pairs with Ukrainian.

English → French

<!-- entries domain=grammar src_lang=en --> <!-- /entries -->

French → English

<!-- entries domain=grammar src_lang=fr --> <!-- /entries -->

Limits

The counts are co-occurrence in sentence pairs, not word alignment; patterns catch some unrelated words (French large in au large, English pain in a name) and miss some inflected forms. Europarl and DGT dominate the totals, so EU usage weighs most; EU French has legitimised some look-alikes that general French still avoids (contrôle), and non-native Euro-English inverts some traps (pretend for "claim"), as the pair manual notes (§7.1). The entries are our selection, not a complete dictionary. Back to the folder README, the pair manual and the context list.

The Elamur team

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/false-friends/en-fr/