Do German English Language Learners know English Homophones?

There are many ubiquitous words in English language that either sound or are spelt alike which cause ambiguity at the lexical level to learners of English. This could lead to a serious difficulty in communication in general as well as in translation or interpretation in particular. As far as German learners are concerned, this study explores the reasons beyond this ambiguity for undergraduate German students studying International Technical Translation. It was revealed that the negative effect of their L1 and their vocabulary deficiency are the main reasons for their low performance in both recognition and production homophones tests