Error Analysis on Japanese - Sinhala Translations

Abstract

Language translation is one of the most in-demand job opportunities for foreign language learning students in Sri Lanka. Japanese language among the other foreign languages has been taught from the school level to the undergraduate level for many years. Recently, a fast increase is seen in the number of Japanese tourists and investment companies due to various reasons in the country. In this context, Japanese-Sinhala, Sinhala-Japanese translation is considered one of the in-demand job opportunities which can easily be fulfilled by those Japanese learning students. Nevertheless, at present students of Japanese are not competent enough to engage in successful Japanese-Sinhala translations and there are many errors in their translations. Those errors can be seen mostly as a result of transfer from L1, intra-lingual, or over-generalization of L2 system or intra- lingual error. There are approaches of assessing learners translation ability (using, integrative testing and communicative testing) (Buck, 2001) both for the linguistic forms and comprehension. Many learners can easily find the meaning of the words and phrases from the dictionaries and recognize the linguistic form, but they cannot have a correct comprehension of the text. Therefore It is vitally important to give careful attention to this area, and need to build up skills of students in Japanese-Sinhala translation. The primary purpose of this study is to analyze what errors students make in their translations when they translate passages from Japanese into Sinhala by reviewing their translated sentences. The writing will be evaluated basically and the sentences with errors will be recorded to identify the types and frequency of errors. The main focus will be on the errors of ; use of words and expressions, use of suitable word order, use of suitable grammar, use of preposition, articles, use of tense and voice.