ERRORS IN TRANSLATION FROM ENGLISH INTO THAI OF THE THIRD-YEAR ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS, NAKHON PHANOM UNIVERSITY

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate grammatical and semantic errors in translation of English into Thai produced by twenty students majoring in English at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Science, Nakhon Phanom University.  The data was a 20-item test of English-into-Thai translation.  The findings revealed that the participants produced 170 errors:  80 were grammatical, 90 semantic. The grammatical errors found in the translated sentences produced by the participants were influenced by their misconceptions about passive voice, tenses, and dummy subjects, while all semantic errors found were influenced by the participants’ misperception and misunderstanding of homonyms, phrasal verbs or two-word verbs, and idioms.