Applying Corpus Methodology to Error Analysis of Students' Translation into the L1: The Context of Audiovisual Translation

Abstract

The aim of the present research is to investigate error patterns in students’ translation of the audiovisual discourse and to describe factors influencing the process of interpretation. As translation into the mother tongue is usually considered to be the norm, abstracts taken from the movie script were rendered by participants from English (L2) into Russian (L1). The data was collected from 12 learners studying at the Department of Translation and Interpretation at PyatigorskStateLinguisticUniversity (the city of Pyatigorsk, Russia) and organized in two corpora. Being very typical genres present in any motion picture, a monologue and a dialogue were under consideration. Nowadays more and more research is being done in the field of audiovisual translation, and one of goals of this study is to contribute to the overall research in this area, as well as to see what problematic aspects it presents to translation trainees. Employing error analysis method often recurred to when studying erroneous forms in student productions, the study established the error taxonomy based on the word’s lexical meaning dividing all the errors into those caused by propositional, expressive and presupposed meaning of the lexical item. An additional group of errors was specified for some variants encountered in the monologue and caused by the complexity of syntactical structures unfamiliar to the learners. The findings of the research show several error patterns typical for both the monologue and the dialogue and in accordance with the results some pedagogical applications were formulated in order to improve the didactics of audiovisual translation training. Despite the limited size of the corpora used for this paper, the investigation of this area is rather promising and needs to be extended further