Construction employees are required to have good knowledge of foreign language professional terms. The survey of higher school students revealed the fact of their being reluctant to the issues of good knowledge of terminology and safety in future professional activities. They should be able to cope with homonyms that may cause confusion. Therefore, the research considers ‘false friends of a translator’ taking account of their similarities or differences in the pronunciation, meaning and spelling in English and Russian. To realize this aim the authors empirically surveyed two groups of a higher school final-year students to contribute to their language development through good knowledge of terms. The research was conducted on the base of comparison, observation and empirical methods and the teaching-practicing-controlling approach. The results obtained show that proper educating the future specialists to the use of the lexical units under consideration correctly can improve their professional growth and safety. The results can be used in language teaching practice, in making dictionaries for special purposes, as well as for making some possible contribution to terminology science.

The authors of the article analyze the Russian and English phraseological terms in the field of construction and architecture and reveal the absolutely identical, full and partial phraseological equivalents, phraseological analogues, calques and half-calques. It helps to identify and describe the linguistic peculiarities of this sphere of knowledge in the process of comparative analysis. The absolutely identical phraseological equivalence is shown in the examples of compared meanings of phraseological units, their style, structure, image and grammatical form. Absolute phraseological equivalents are distinguished when phraseological units coincide semantically, stylistically and lexically, and their partial coincidence is found on the morphological level. Partial phraseological equivalents of scientific and technical terms in the field of construction and architecture coincide with Russian phraseological units semantically, stylistically and lexically in some cases. Phraseological analogues can be singled out when phraseological units coincide in meaning and style, but differ in their image.

Representation of cognitive area and revealing terminological characteristics of the Russian and English names of building materials (NBMs) determine the topicality of the research and the article’s problematic. The authors of the article analyze the Russian and English NBMs and reveal their main stages with the comparative description, and chооse the definition of the names, in which the basic word-identifier of the leading cognitive features have been highlighted. These features have become the basics for the formation of the thematic groups. The classification of the names of building materials is formed from five groups: organic materials / orgonicheskie materialy; inorganic materials / neorgonicheskie materialy; metals and metal products / metaly i izdelija iz nih; other building materials / prochie stroitel’nye materialy; properties of building materials / svojstva stroitel’nyh materialov. Properties of building materials is subdivided into models according to their structural characteristics: physical properties / fizicheskie svoystva; mechanical properties / mehanicheskie svojstva; defects / defekty.

In the article, the results of the comparative study of the substantive phraseological units (SPU) of the English and German languages from the structural perspective are presented. Structural analysis has shown that the most common model of the SPU of the English and German languages is “adjective attribute + noun”. The results of the analysis of the component composition have displayed that in the German and English languages, high recurrence is characteristic of the SPU group with the animal component. SPU with the religious component also prevail in German, whereas in English the names of food products and beverages are quite common. Somatisms, colour terms and proper names are less common in the SPU of both the languages.

The article aims to identify the structural and semantic peculiarities of the English, German and Russian phraseological units with a component-ornithonym. The originality of the study involves the systematization of the English, German and Russian phraseological units with a component-ornithonym. The research material was classified into thematic groups, which allowed identifying interesting peculiarities. The semantic analysis of phraseological units with a component-ornithonym revealed both similarities and differences in ornithonyms usage in the structure of phraseological units with similar meaning in different languages.