Sprachtheorie und Übersetzungsfehler — Prolegomena zu Empirie und Theorie einer Fehleranalyse im Bereich der Übersetzungswissenschaft

The paper emphasizes the necessity to provide a theoretical frame of reference for a rationalised, linguistically-based error analysis in the field of translation. After discussing the relationship between text-type and error typology, the paper suggests two basic categories of error analysis. A ‘descriptive’ approach centers on the degree to which the intended communicative effect or value of the whole piece of discourse is affected by a given local error. An ‘explanatory’ approach locates the origin of the error at a point in the sequence of steps of cognitive operations involved in translating understood as a psychological real-time process. The dialectic between the two approaches is discussed and their respective effect on error evaluation exemplified