Analysis of Translation Errors Among Jordanian Students When Translating the Text Al-Ġazāla Al-Ḏakillah: The Case of 4th-Year Spanish-English Students at Al al-Bayt University

Abstract

Translation is a much more complicated task than it really seems. It is a work in which nuances, knowledge, culture, and the transmission of science are important. The aim is to study the translation errors made by the students of the Translation-2 course at the University of Al al-Bayt in order to improve their level and learn about and solve the difficulties that our students have. We have asked them to translate a text taken from the book Uncle Hamdī's Tales, which is considered a simple literary text full of sentences with different tenses and highly varied vocabulary. We have detected that there are many spelling difficulties, problems with the semantic meanings in the translation, and failures in terms of correctly translating the syntactic structure of Arabic sentences into Spanish. We have proposed several ways to solve these problems, including spending more time in the course to review tenses with students, strengthening their vocabulary, and having optional tasks to raise their level of writing and spelling.