Linguistic Errors And Extra-linguistic Errors

During the past ten years, China has seen great achievements in the research of translation teaching. Studies have been carried out to explore the nature and features of translation competence, which is the primary objective of translation teaching. The enrichment in the notion of translation competence has further distinguished translation teaching from foreign language teaching. An effective error analysis can assess translation competence by identifying, classifying, describing, explaining, and assessing errors students make in their translations. However, few studies were made about error analysis on its theoretical foundation of translation competence. As a result, error analysis, focusing mainly on linguistic errors, did not function effectively as a tool to assess deficiencies of translation competence.This research aims to explore an error analysis of linguistic errors and extra-linguistic errors collected from students. The analysis focuses on extra-linguistic errors made because of problems in identifying, understanding and tackling extra-linguistic factors which include pragmatics, culture and context.The study examines the translation of 21 students majoring in English. After the translation errors were collected, linguistic errors and extra-linguistic errors were identified and classified according to the proposed typology. This study classifies linguistic errors into referential errors and grammatical and syntactic errors, and extra-linguistic errors into the categories of pragmatic errors, lack of cultural competence, and lack of context awareness. The results show that students have great problems in identifying extra-linguistic factors and that when students come up with difficulty in understanding extra-linguistic factors, they tend to resort to linguistic clues to solve the problems within linguistic level. Such kinds of strategies manifest students' poor awareness of extra-linguistic factors and deficiency of extra-linguistic competence. Finally, pedagogical implications are drawn to arouse awareness of extra-linguistic factors and to develop translation competence.