English husband, a married man in relation to his wife, is make in Swedish. The English verb make is göra or tillverka in Swedish.

Husband comes from Old Norse húsbóndi, master of the house.

With the same origin, husbonde in Swedish means master, the male head of the family, the owner of the farm. Now obsolete, husbonde also used to refer to the male owner of a dog, but the word has been shortened into husse in colloquial Swedish. The British record label His Master’s Voice was Husbondens röst in Swedish.

Husband is also a Swedish word. It refers to a resident musical group.

Husband and make are typical examples of false friends. Read more here.

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The modern use of semester also differs between languages. In English, the word refers to a study period at schools and universities. In the USA there are two semesters, spring and fall. In the UK three are three, usually called terms, autumn, spring, and summer. The sense of study period comes from German Semester. In Swedish, this is termin.

Semester in Swedish means holiday or vacation. It is not six months long, but at least five weeks with pay.

Semester is a typical false friend in English and Swedish. With the same origin, the word has very different meanings in the two languages. You can read more about false friends here.

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Black is Swedish slang meaning broke, without money. In English, to be in the black means just the opposite, profitable, having money in the bank.

The English expression in the red means that you are in debt or that you are losing money. The idiom comes from bookkeeping, where losses were recorded in red ink.

So, to be black in Swedish is the same as being in the red in English.

You can read about many other such false friends in my book.

And if you want to learn more about English idioms, you will find some here and here. Some idioms are unique to English, while others are identical in English and Swedish.

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Fart in English is what you do when you let out gas through your anus or the sound of that action. A nicer way to express this is to say break wind, which is what Old English feortan meant. The corresponding Swedish verb is fisa or prutta.

Fart in Swedish comes from Low German faren, to travel.

In Swedish, fart means speed, velocity, or movement. Not surprisingly, traffic signs including the word are popular objects for English-speaking tourists taking photos. Infart means entrance and utfart exit from property premises.  Farthållare is Swedish for cruise control, fartkamera is speed camera, and maxfart is top speed. If you are fartblind, speed blind, you don’t realize that you are driving too fast—you have got used to the high speed. Then you may be considered a fartdåre, a speed maniac or a fartsyndare, literally ‘a speed sinner’, a speeder.

Elevators in Denmark often have a sign saying I fart meaning under way. An anecdote says that, during a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, somebody realized just in time what the sign meant in English, and it was rapidly covered up.

Fart is a typical example of a false friend. False friends are words in two languages that look and/or sound similar but whose meanings are completely or partially different. See some more English–Swedish false friends here and examples from a few languages here. You can read about more than 400 English–Swedish false friends in my book (copyeditor.se/books).

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When General Motors in Canada launched their Buick LaCrosse, they had to rebrand it after realizing that the name referred to masturbation in French Canadian slang.

Exactly the same mistake was made by Mitsubishi in Spanish-speaking markets. The name of their Pajero is Spanish for masturbation (the word can also refer to a lazy or stupid person). 

Ford Pinto was a popular model in Europe, but when it was launched in Brazil, the importers discovered that the name is Brazilian–Portuguese slang for small penis. The car was renamed Corcel, which means horse.

A similar mistake was made by the Chinese auto maker Chana. In Brazil, chana sounds like the slang word for female genitalia, and so the name was changed to Changan.

Arguably, localization is crucial for brand reputation, and it is important to know about false friends (which you can red about here).

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It is clear that false friends may give rise to amusing and sometimes embarrassing mistakes, but they can also cause potentially disastrous misunderstandings with serious consequences.

Here are some examples of English false friends in other languages
(The first letter in German nouns is upper-case):

English–French

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