An Analysis of Translation Skill from English to Thai; The Case Study of Distance Learners of English Major at an Open University

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze grammatical and semantic errors in translation of English to Thai. The content to be translated in this study is mainly on the topic of “the machine translation”. This is the case study of 30 students who were studying at an Open University of Thailand. Simple random sampling was used in this study. The instrument was the 18-item test of English into Thai translation. The analysis framework follows the translation framework introduced by Atchara Laisattrueklai. The result of this study showed that the participants produced overall 139 errors: 116 errors caused by grammatical errors and 23 from semantic errors. The grammatical errors found in the translated sentences produced by the participants were influenced from the misconceptions of tense, passive voice, and dummy subject while all semantic errors found were affected from the participants’ misconception and misunderstanding of homonyms, phrasal verbs or two-word verbs and idioms. The results of this study can be used to apply to an improvement or the production of the materials or learning content of the courses involving translation learning and teaching. This concerns specifically with the English to Thai translation course curriculum.