Error Analysis of Translated Written English: A Case Study of Translation Major Undergraduates at Al-Iraqia University

Abstract

Errors are an inevitable part of any learning process. They provide a rich area for designing and developing educational programs. Errors are made by the students while translating sentences offer a great insight into their weaknesses. This paper concerns itself with third grade students in Department of Translation, College of Arts at Al-Iraqia University. Fifty students were asked to translate ten sentences from English into Arabic. The translated sentences were intentionally chosen to be simple in an attempt to eliminate any possible involvement with complicated content. Their products have been analyzed and classified in terms of Abi Samra’s (2003) discussion of errors. It has been hypothesized that most undergraduate Iraqi students at Al-Iraqia University have difficulties in: 1) the use of concord (i.e. subject- verb agreement and specifically third person singular -s); 2) the translation of nominal sentences from Arabic to English and; 3) most errors come as a result of negative transfer (interlanguage). It has been concluded that: 1) around 75% of students suffer from the correct use of copular verbs while translating nominal sentences from Arabic; 2) the grammatical errors (articles and pronouns) are more common than syntactic and semantic ones.