The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 9 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1428690
Lost in Translation: Error Analysis of Texts Translated from Arabic into English by
Provisionally accepted- Department of English Language, Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Rabigh, King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh, Saudi Arabia
Biographic translation is crucial in today's globalised world to preserve histories or shed light on the lives of people who influenced their nations or the world. The literature on biographic translation and the factors hindering such translation in an English as a foreign language (EFL) setting, especially in the Saudi context, is relatively limited. In the present study, the author analysed the errors made by Saudi EFL learners when they translated a biography from Arabic into English. The data were drawn from a short text translated by female final-year university students as part of their course evaluations. The author conducted a qualitative analysis and classified errors according to Pospescu's taxonomy. The results showed that the students committed all the three error types: linguistic, comprehensive, and translation. Within these three types, the students made diverse errors, ranging from misusing tenses to misspelling words. Consequently, their overall translations were unsatisfactory. This finding is helpful for both learners and educators, as the identified translation errors can be used as teaching aids in translation classes. The findings put emphasis on the importance of practice and prompt feedback as essential aids educators can use to support their students during their translation learning.
Keywords: syntactic errors, Morphological errors, semantic errors, misuse of prepositions, omission
Received: 12 May 2024; Accepted: 30 Oct 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Alluhaybi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Maram Alluhaybi, Department of English Language, Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Rabigh, King Abdulaziz University, Rabigh, 21911, Saudi Arabia
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.