TITLE:
AN ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN BILINGUAL TRANSLATION
A.Background for Choosing the SubjectIt is realized that human interaction and all society activities will be dead without language. Language is the most important means of communication in human life because language refers to human being. It is used by people to interact with others and to convey some information that they have. By using language, information can be spread clearly in every level of society. Trask says that without language, people could hardly have created the human world they know (1996: 1).
There are many functions of language and some of them are 1) to impart factual information and to convey essential commands; 2) to communicate feelings and emotions (crying, screaming, etc); 3) to maintain social contact on a friendly level; 4) for purely aesthetic reasons.
Through language, the culture of people can be built and developed. Language is used to make communication with the society. It is also used by people to adapt with the new environment they meet. According to Keraf (1980: 1), language is a means of communication between the members of society in the form of sounds created by the human organ of speech. Whereas, Lim Kiat Boey defines language as what people use in communication, or it is made up of sounds when they speak; words that refer to things; sentences that convey meaning (1975: 1). Language is a habit. It is got and learned with repetition in human life (Parera, 1997:42).
For English Department students who study language, it is important to know the language aspects because they must be capable to translate one language to the other language. The language competence must be gained through learning process. Hardjono (1988: 13) says that learning another language means learning all language aspects, because one aspect with another aspect is a unity.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Like any other scientific study, language analysis is done systematically within the framework of some general theories of language structure (Boey, 1975:3). There are many subjects that can be studied from linguistic category. Linguistics covers phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics and lexicology.
One of the language categories is syntax which studies grammar besides morphology. Syntax is the study of the rules to form or to make grammatical sentences in a language or the study of pattern of sentences and phrase formation from word (Yerkes, 1989: 1443). Furthermore, grammar is studied in syntax and it is an important aspect of a language. According to Hornby, grammar is defined as the rules in a language for changing the form of words and combining them into sentences (1995: 517).
Languages express grammatical relationships in different ways. Every language has its own grammatical rule, but two different languages may use the same means of expressing grammatical relationships and also use them in the same way. In this case, English Letters Department students of Ahmad Dahlan University study about both Indonesian and English which have different grammatical rules. English grammar is different from Indonesian grammar. They have each own characteristic to make a sentence in their own language. Nevertheless, language uses different grammatical devices to signal the same meaning. The relationship of subject, verb and object or complement is expressed in word order by using the grammatical rule. If the order changes, the meaning must also change.
Not only grammar, but also translation skill is important in learning another language. In reality, translation skill is often faced by people in daily life, for example: the translation of medical sciences, economic and political sciences, electronic guide book, children short story, etc.
Translation itself means a process of replacing/ reproducing/ transferring from the source language (SL) of written text/material concept into its target language (TL) equivalent in such a way that people retain the meaning and style (Karnadidjaya via Sutopo & Candraningrum, 2001: 4). Moreover, according to Wilss, translation is a transfer process which aims at the transformation of a written SL text into an optimally equivalent TL text, and which requires the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic understanding and analytical processing of the SL (Suryawinata and Hariyanto, 2003:16).
Grammar and translation skill are very important in learning another language. Some differences of the grammatical systems between two languages can cause grammatical errors in translation process. Difficulties in relation to English grammatical system are often faced by students of the English Letters Department who take Translation I and Translation II. For those two subjects, students have to translate text, which is derived from some sources, such as newspaper, magazine, student’s hand out or lecture task. Their topic can be culture, arts and other sciences in the form of Indonesian or English.
In relation to the explanation above, students are motivated to be able to express the events in English or vice versa, which means that the students can express the events in the form of texts in both English and Indonesian. From those activities, students often face difficulties that can cause the error of the linguistic level, for examples: omission, addition, misformation (wrong selection), or misordering (wrong ordering). Those errors may be at a graphological or phonological level (Corder, 1981:36).
In studying bilingualism, many people assume that it is easy to understand that the errors made by bilinguals are caused by their mixing of the SL and TL. Moreover, it can be caused by the limited knowledge of the second language learners for mastering many grammatical rules of the TL. In this research, Indonesian sentences are as the SL and English sentences are as the TL. Different class of errors are represented by sentences such as We will be marry, He is admire them…, You should back...., Four childs loved..., She regret her decision…, etc.
In the example above, the sentence We will be marry, is translated from Kita akan segera dinikahkan. In English, the main verb in a passive voice is in the form of be+ participle, therefore, the part of the sentence should be We will be married.
Based on the background above and the phenomenon which happens in translation class of English Letters Department Students of Ahmad Dahlan University, the researcher tries to analyze this study in her paper entitled An Analysis of Grammatical Errors in Bilingual Translation Made by the Fourth Semester Students of English Letters Department of Ahmad Dahlan University in 2006-2007 Academic Year.
This research will analyze the grammatical errors in bilingual translation in translation class based on syntactic approach. It needs to be analyzed because of some reasons, they are 1) to know how far the ability of the fourth semester students in translating text from Indonesian sentences into English sentences is; 2) to find the method to fix the system of teaching process in the translation class; and 3) to decrease the errors made by students.
