Errors in Translation: A Comparative Study of Noun Phrase in English and Malay Abstracts

Abstract

as a summary of a dissertation harbours important information where it serves to attract readers to consider reading the entire passage or to abandon it. This study seeks to investigate the backward translation of abstracts made by 10 randomly selected postgraduate students. This research serves as a guideline for students in composing their abstracts as it aims to compare the differences in noun phrase structure written in Malay as translated from English. It also analyses the types of errors when English noun phrases are translated to Malay. Preliminary findings from this pilot study found that translation errors committed were mainly inaccurate word order, inaccurate translation, added translation, dropped translation and also structure change. For this study, an exploratory mode of semantic analysis is applied by looking at noun phrases, the meaningful group of words that form a major part of any sentence, with the noun as the head of the group. Syntax is inevitably interwoven in the analysis as the structure and grammatical aspects of the translations are also analysed. They are examined by comparing English texts to its corresponding translation in the Malay language. Particularly relevant in this study is the need to emphasize on the semantics and syntax skills of the students before a good transaltion work can be produced. Language practitioners can also tap on translation activities to improve the learners' language competency.

Translation Error Taxonomies in Indonesian Tourism Guidebooks

“…Napitupulu (2017) investigates "Analyzing Indonesian-English Abstracts Translation in View of Translation Errors by Google Translate", the error of translation in the undergraduate thesis students of Methodist error found in the abstracts of students' undergraduate thesis and that some words have been mistranslated and do not fit the context of the source text. Zamin and Hasan (2018), Salam, Akil, andRahman (2017), Jahanshi andKafipour (2015) investigate their data by employing Keshavarz's.…”

Move structures found in the final project abstracts written by Indonesians and Filipinos

“…However, abstracts from the fields of law, linguistics, and police did not conform to either model. Some other previous studies researched the comparison of abstracts from different fields and journals of research (Behnam & Golpour, 2014;Darabad, 2016;Zamin & Hasan, 2018). Even though numerous academics have studied the move structure of an abstract, no study has yet compared the final project report abstracts produced by undergraduate students at two different universities.…”

Move Structure Analysis on Research Article Abstracts in National and International SCOPUS Indexed Journals

“…The topic studied are review of errors in abstracts (Lee & Kim, 2013), writing style (Zhou & Liao, 2018), rhetoric structure and communication purpose (Loutayf, Salta, & Salta, 2017), discourse structure and linguistic feature (Arsyad, 2013), lexical profiling (Ghanbarzadeh & Afzali, 2017), rhetorical move (Amalia et al, 2018;Zhang & Wanaruk, 2016), and similarities and differences in the abstract and introduction of a thesis (Ebadi, Weisi, Thuy, & Nguyen, 2019). Several studies also compares abstracts from various fields and research journals (Abarghooeinezhad & Simin, 2015;Darabad, 2016;Maswana et al, 2015;Saeeaw & Tangkiengsirisin, 2014;Tseng, 2011;Zamin & Hasan, 2018;Zhou & Liao, 2018), in the field of environment, management and marketing, as well as computer engineering and information system.…”