An Analysis On Lexical And Grammatical Errors On Students' Indonesian To English Text Translation

Abstract

Knowing what the learners know is part of teaching process. Investigating students’ errors in translation would provide a lot of data on linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge that students have already acquired. This study is aimed at finding lexical and grammatical errors on the students’ Indonesian to English translation text. The finding could explain the students’ obstacles in translation process. There were ten  translation  scripts made by the students of an English Education Program taken as the sample of the study. The study was conducted through the error analyses procedure; i.e. identifying, describing, explaining, and finding the causes of errors. First, errors were identified and classified. Second, it was described using related theories and explained how the errors occurred. The last step was identifying the possible cause of the errors. The study found that students made some lexical errors such as miss spelling and inappropriate word choice. This is assumed to be caused by students’ lack of knowledge on spelling, word formation, word equivalence, and different point of view in Indonesian and English expressions. The students made grammatical errors on the use of affixes, verb, word order, and auxiliaries. It was found that students perform omitting and adding, showing the effort to avoid the word due to their difficulties in putting the correct word in the construction, and using translation strategy, i.e.modulation to anticipate the difficulties in having literal translation. All findings should give clues for teachers to help learners improve their performance in translation. Students need to be equipped more with the knowledge that both source and target language operate differently in  expressing meaning.