The correlation between students' vocabulary mastery and their translation ability: a correlational research at the 6th semester students of English Education Department State Islamic University of Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung

Vocabulary mastery seems to play a little role in language learning. In fact, vocabulary is the core of the language that every English education learner should master. Lack of vocabulary could impact to those language skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, including translation ability. The learner can mistranslates a word because of lack of vocabulary which in turn can lead to an unreadable translation product. The problem that is emphasized in this research is how vocabulary mastery correlates with their translation ability in learning process in English Education Department, this research was also intended to find out how is the learners’ vocabulary mastery in senior year and their translation ability and to know whether vocabulary mastery and translation ability correlate each other. The design of this research was correlation quantitative method. The population was limited to sixth-semester students of English Education Department of State Islamic University of Sunan Gunung Djati. Vocabulary mastery test score and translation ability test score as instruments given to the 30 students. The results of those scores were analyzed to find out the correlation by using Pearson’s correlation calculation in SPSS 23. Students’ vocabulary mastery average score was 57.07 means fair level score. As for the translation mean or average score, is 55.07 means fair translation. Results show that the students' vocabulary mastery and their translation ability were indicated a very high correlation with correlation value, “rcount”=0.828, in the scale of 0.80-1.00 and the score of “rcount” is higher than “r table” with degree of significant α=5% (0.361) and 1% (0.463) with n=30, it indicates that the score of correlation coefficient is significant. In other words, the students’ vocabulary mastery and their translation ability are significantly correlated with each other