Investigating English Major Students’ Attitudes Towards The Syntactic Errors During Translation Activities From Arabic Into English

Résumé: Translation is a discipline which consists of an activity that conveys messages from one language to another; nevertheless, it is considered as a complicated task because many students face difficulties when translating and commit so many errors. Among these errors the grammatical ones are the most noticed that could be categorized as syntactic errors. The current study is dedicated to investigate the most frequent syntactic errors as well as their causes; moreover, it aims to find solutions to these issues. In doing so, a descriptive research methodology was used to accomplish the aims of this study with third year EFL students at Larbi Ben M‟hidi University. Two groups out of five have been selected as a sample which consists of sixty students that represents (40%) of the whole population. First of all, the students were tested through a designed test composed of thirty two sentences to be translated; this test was accepted from the supervisor which indicates its validity. Then students were administered a questionnaire in order to answer and describe their attitudes towards syntactic errors. The findings of this research asserted that the students‟ lack of knowledge of translation rules from one language to another resulted in errors related in the syntactic areas such as word order, articles, prepositions, tense, and demonstratives. The frequency of occurrence of the previous errors shows that tense and articles‟ use and prepositions‟ errors are the most frequent, hence Word order and demonstratives have less frequency of occurrence but still should be taken into consideration. On the basis of the resulted findings, it is recommended to encourage students to carry out studies in translation topics; in addition, using textbook issues of translation that can help avoiding syntactic errors.

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