An Analysis of Errors in Japanese Translations of English

This is an analysis of errors found in the translations by 18 students of an English article on foreign-language teaching, "In Search of a Method" by Clifford H. Prator (1976). The analysis was conducted mainly about the errors in terms of the vocabulary and syntax of the text. Most of the errors in the aspects of both vocabulary and syntax are ones that are considered to have originated from one common source, that is, translating the text word-by-word. The lexical errors seem to be mainly due to mis-matching English words or phrases with those of Japanese, which in turn can be ascribed to mechanical replacement of the English words or phrases with the Japanese ones which the students that erred erroneously regarded as their semantic equivalents without turning to their original contexts of the English text for their meaning. The syntactic errors also can largely be traced back to the word-for-word translation procedure. Since this sort of translation is word-centered too much, it tends to lead to a failure to grasp the meaning of any collocationally related group of words or coreferential relations between two words in a sentence, hence preventing the students from construing the whole meaning of the sentence. In the same way the misconstruing of modification structure can also be regarded as resulting from replacing each constituent word of the structure with Japanese words and thus missing its particular function in a given larger structure. The structure with which most of the students had difficulty in comprehending is the one that involves a relative clause, especially the one with a preposition between a relative pronoun and its antecedent. This may also be because this structure defies word-for-word translation to the greatest degree. This word-centered translation procedure naturally fails to look at a text from a discoursal perspective