An analysis of translation errors in 5 literary genres based on American Translation Association (ATA) framework

The analysis of translation errors holds a great deal of importance in the realm of translation studies. Accordingly, many pieces of research have been done on the topic of translation errors analysis in different text types including religious, journalistic, tourism, commercial, and legal texts. Nevertheless, no research has been conducted within literary genres with regard to translation errors from English to Persian. Thus, the present study aimed to analyze translation errors in five literary genres including prose, poetry, non-fiction, play, and media based on the American Translation Association (ATA) taxonomy. Three objectives were set for this study. The first aim was to distinguish the most frequent error types within each literary genre. The second objective was to determine whether there is any relationship between the text types and the errors. The third and last objective was to extract the possible pattern of committed errors within each genre. To conduct the research, 28 students of English Translation Studies were selected as the participants of the study. Translations’ errors were identified and categorized based on the framework of the study. After analyzing the data, the findings revealed that the most frequent error types in the prose text were: verb tense (44.44%), cohesion (15.55%), and omission (11.11%); the most recurrent error types in the poetry text were punctuation (19.22%), terminology (16.16%), and omission (16.16%); mostly visited error types in the non-fiction text were terminology (33.58%), omission (16.29%), and punctuation (8.64%); omission (22.64%), verb tense (16.71%), and literalness (15.63%) were the most frequent error types committed in the play text; and misunderstanding (23.77%), omission (20.08%), and terminology (13.93%) were the most recurrent error types in the media text. The results obtained from the ANOVA test indicated that text type is significant except for non-fiction and play. Moreover, there was a similar pattern among errors in the five genres. The findings of the present study can be of help to translators, teachers, students, and researchers in the field of Translation Studies