Error analysis as a technique in translating Arabic administrative texts into English

Abstract EN

The study seeks to investigate, identify, and analyze translation errors committed by 3rd year students in the Department of Translation in translating Arabic administrative texts into English and then uncovers the reasons behind these errors.

To achieve these goals, (6) Arabic administrative texts have been selected and then translated by (58) students.

Only (24) translations have been selected randomly to be the samples of the study.

Then an assessment will be made on the students’ translation based on a proposed translation suggested by the researchers.

The errors will be categorized according to Liao’s (2010) classification of error types: rendition errors, language errors, and miscellaneous errors.

A modification has been made on Liao’s framework by the researchers to match with the present study on language errors category by dividing these types of errors into two aspects: Syntactic and Semantic.

The general tendency of the analysis shows that the errors occur as a result of mismatching in one of these types or more.

The study aims at finding some satisfied answers for the following questions: a) What types of errors are committed by the students in translating Arabic administrative texts? b) What are the most frequent among other types of errors? c) What are the reasons behind committing such type of errors? The results showed that semantic category was the most frequent type of errors committed by the students in translating administrative texts from Arabic into English.

In addition, it is found that the percentage of translations errors category has been affected by the percentages of other types of errors, that is to say, committing any error whether at the linguistic or miscellaneous aspects will effect on the accuracy and quality of the final product of translation.