Translation ‘errors’

What is an error and what is a translation ‘error’? The term “error” usually means that something is wrong. In written texts – both in original texts and translated texts – errors can be classified as, for example, pragmatic, semantic, idiomatic, orthographic, linguistic or stylistic errors. But what is a ‘translation error’ – with focus on ‘translation’? If we define a translation as the production of a Target Text (TT) which is based on a Source Text (ST), a translation error arises from the existence of a relationship between two texts. Translations are carried out for many different reasons. The inter-lingual “real-life” translations we think of here are created in communicative situations which are defined by pragmatic conditions like sender, receiver, time, place and purpose of the translation, and also by cultural backgrounds and norms that may differ for ST and TT. Thus translation ‘errors’ occur because something has gone wrong during the transfer and movement from the ST to the TT. Translation ‘errors’ can be caused by misunderstandings of the translation brief or of the content of the ST, by not rendering the meaning of the ST accurately, by factual mistakes, terminological or stylistic flaws, and by different kinds of interferences between ST and TT. Interferences are projections of unwanted features from one language to the other and from ST to TT. They occur because of an assumption of symmetry between the languages and/or cultures which may appear in some cases, but not in the actual case. Several levels of description are affected, i.e., interferences can be characterized as cultural, pragmatic, text-linguistic, semantic, syntactic or stylistic errors. The perception of what constitutes a translation ‘error’ varies according to translation theories and norms*.