Who are we?

Do you want to avoid the improper use of language? Make this dictionary your regular working tool

Whether you’re a translator, interpreter or somebody who is in daily contact with English, we believe that everyone deserves reliable, easily accessible and free assistance in order to correctly understand English terminology.

If you have read this far, I imagine you probably want to know who is behind the False Friends English-Spanish Dictionary.

Before I introduce the team, I’d like to tell you something.

Why are we doing this?

If I’m being honest, the reason I created this dictionary wasn’t so much the desire to uphold the language as the need to vent the profound irritation I would feel when I saw glaring false friends in the press.

Admittedly, my irritation was totally out of proportion.

Given everything that’s going on in the world, worrying about whether a journalist translates an English word into the most similar one in Spanish without stopping to think about whether it means the same thing is trivial.

But what can you do, we all have our little foibles.

The point is that, at some point, after seeing for the umpteenth time domestic flights translated as vuelos domésticos (between the bathroom and the kitchen?), the presidential inauguration as la inauguración del Presidente (had he been under construction?), and the European Borders Agency as la Agencia Europea para los Bordes (admittedly, there are disagreeable people, but was it necessary to create an agency to deal with them?), I decided that enough was enough.

I set to work creating this dictionary, and it was a weight off my mind.

It would be presumptuous of me to claim that it’s of much use, but I continue to hope that somebody will read it and, when they have to translate a text from English, suppress the urge to always use the Spanish word that is most similar to the English original and, if in doubt, will consult this dictionary.