Errors in Translation: A Tool for Linguistic and Socio-cultural Competence

Abstract

One of the important insights in recent translation studies research is that errors are a consequence of both linguistic and cultural misconceptions. In recent years translation studies have become increasingly involved in a quest for explanations of all phenomena associated with meaning interaction and a lot of detailed research has been attempted at most translation stages. Whole solid books have been written on specific topics but whole solid books can not include all the variations that different manifestations of language might adopt. As far as we understand, these theoretical ideas have not normally been applied to translations so far and when they have, explanations and descriptive interpretations given do sound rather artificial and unsatisfactory. We intend to propose an analytic approach to solve problems on translation based upon the principles of identity or equivalence, the main ideas of which might be suitable both for research and tuition purposes. In this paper, clear and cut distinctions between canonical and non-canonical expressions, collocations and idiomatic expressions are summed up succinctly both for language explanations and translation analyses, due to the fact that a good number of realizations belonging to the Gray Areas (GA) of language may arise from recurrent combinations of specific types of combined lexical items. The resultant lack of interaction between L1 propositions and L2 representations, identical or not, is often explainable and clarified by the Error Analysis (EA) method. Data collected and analysed here have been chosen at random.