Lexical errors analysis of Saudi university english major students’ translation texts

This thesis provides an examination of lexical errors in the translation productions of Saudi English major students. It investigates how students at the university level cope with their L2 lexicon by analysing the types of incorrect lexical choice by students in their translation tasks, determining the frequency distribution of the types of lexical errors identified and which of these errors can be traced back to L1/L2 influences. To have a better understanding of the characteristics of the students’ lexical errors made in their translations, a comprehensive taxonomy of errors classification was developed to determine how often lexical errors occur in formal and semantic categories. The study utilised a quantitative method and adopted an error analysis approach for the purpose of the analysis. For data collection, a corpus of 105 translation texts was used, and the identified lexical errors in the corpus texts were sorted into 31 categories. The frequency of each type of error was calculated and, consequently, the most common errors were determined statistically using frequency analysis. The results revealed that formal lexical errors involved misselection errors, misformation errors, and distortion errors. Based on the analysis, distortion errors were more pervasive than the other types of formal lexical errors. On the other hand, semantic lexical errors involved confusion of sense relations errors, collocation errors, stylistic errors, and incompletion errors. The confusion of sense relations category was highest in terms of frequency of occurrence followed by incompletion errors. Formal and semantic lexical errors were found to be related to two major sources which are interlingual and intralingual influences. More than half of the lexical errors were due to intralingual influence. The lack of L2 morphemic, syntactic, orthographic, phonologic knowledge, and the lack of L2 lexical knowledge and the confusion between L2 lexical items that are semantically related significantly influenced the students’ words choice in the translated texts. Interlingual influence, on the other hand, made up a considerable proportion of the total lexical errors due to literal translation of L1 words, the transfer of the semantic features associated with L1 lexical items, interference between the students’ L1 and the L2 writing systems, and the transfer of the L1 phonological system. Based on the findings, the study makes a number of recommendations for English language instructors to develop suitable pedagogical solutions to the issue of lexical errors in their students’ translation.