Scaffoldings, Translation Errors, and Language Awareness by Thai University Students

Abstract

Translation is considered one of the most complicated tasks for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners to undertake, as achieving faultless translation requires multiple skills. To render perfect meanings between two languages, syntactic and semantic skills are necessary. However, some tasks require even more, namely pragmatic skill, to translate the profound meanings of the words or phrases and the meanings between a paragraph’s lines. This study was conducted to help Thai university students overcome these obstacles. The teacher’s scaffolding procedures were introduced during the translation process in a translation course to increase the students’ awareness of errors so they could consequently produce sound translations. Our findings show the significant effectiveness of scaffoldings for the improvement of translation tasks with appropriate lexical selection and good semantic form. However, the translation of some language aspects, such as figurative language, still needs further support and investigation.