Portuguese-English false friends, misleading lookalike words, are now searchable online
Cape Coral, FL – November 2, 2026 – Portuguese-English false friends in legal and immigration documents are covered in a free reference maintained by Brazil USA Translations. Plenty of English speakers meet their first false friend at a shop door in Brazil. The sign says puxe. It looks like “push,” so they push, and the door stays shut. Puxe comes from the verb puxar, to pull. The door to push says empurre.
At a door, the cost is a moment of feeling silly. In a court record or an immigration file, a word that looks like English and means something else can change what the document says, and the English reads so naturally that the error is easy to miss. Brazil USA Translations keeps a free reference of 803 verified Portuguese-English false friends, 255 of them in a dedicated legal category.
Lawyers and court interpreters reach for it when an immigration filing or a court record turns on one word, and journalists use it to check a term before it runs. For anyone who translates between Portuguese and English for a living, it settles the pairs that look obvious and are not.
Take deferir. In a Brazilian ruling, pedido deferido means the request was granted. English “defer” means to postpone, or to yield to someone else’s judgment. Translate it as “the request was deferred” and an approval turns into a delay. An attorney assembling records for a USCIS filing could read a petition the applicant won as one that is still waiting on a decision. (Indeferido, the opposite, means denied.)
Conviction is harder to spot, because the English word carries two meanings. One is a firm belief, which is what Portuguese convicção means, and the reference marks the pair as a partial overlap for that reason. The other, in a courtroom, is a formal finding of guilt, and Portuguese uses a different word for that: condenação, or sentença condenatória. Immigration forms ask about criminal convictions in the courtroom sense. Asking a Portuguese speaker about their convicções is asking what they believe. Their criminal record never comes up.
Arresto has nothing to do with handcuffs. It is a judicial attachment, where a court seizes a debtor’s assets as security. The reference gives prejudgment attachment as the English term, and prisão as the Portuguese for an arrest. Mistranslated in a court record, arresto hands someone an arrest that never happened. Its entry describes a US lawyer who read arresto as “arrest” and pictured a client in custody, when the Brazilian court had frozen the client’s assets.
“Everybody gets caught by puxe once. You lean on the glass for a second, then you pull. A court record doesn’t give you that second. The wrong word reads like normal English, so it goes into the file and nobody looks twice. The list is there so you can look twice,” said Ivy Pires of Brazil USA Translations.
The list is searchable and can be filtered by subject. Each entry says what both words mean and gives the correct translation in each direction. Anyone who spots a missing pair can send it in, and it is verified before it goes on the list. Ivy Pires compiles and maintains the reference. Ivy is a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker and a professional document translator at Brazil USA Translations. Brazilian Portuguese is the reference variety for every entry.
The reference is free at https://brazilusatranslations.com/tools/portuguese-english-false-friends/
About Brazil USA Translations:
Brazil USA Translations provides certified Portuguese-English translation of legal and immigration documents, including records filed with USCIS. The company is based in Florida and serves clients nationwide online.
Media Contact
Company Name: Brazil USA Translations
Contact Person: Ivy Pires
Email: Send Email
Phone: 405-850-0892
City: Cape Coral
State: FL
Country: United States
Website: https://brazilusatranslations.com
