Error Analysis Of Thai-Chinese Translation Among Thai Colleague Students

Since Professor Jianji Lu from Beijing Language and Culture University appliedthe concept of “errors” from abroad, the field of teaching Chinese as a foreignlanguage has conducted numerous researches and reached fruitful results during thesethree decades. However, after a review of the literature from the perspective oftranslation, the researches about error analysis are not sufficient, especially researchesabout Thai-Chinese translation errors. In fact, when Thai students are the beginningstage of Chinese learning, they are unable to possess skilled Chinese expression andmode of thinking. Therefore, during the process of translating Thai in to Chinese, Thaistudents use their mother language to organize the content they want to convey andthen translate the content into Chinese. Then during the change of two languages, it isinevitable that the translation will be interfered by mother language, causing errors inThai-Chinese translation.In present, error analysis in teaching Chinese as a second language has beenmuch mature, but the focus on Thai-Chinese translation of Thai students is a newresearch direction. Based on the corpus data from the Chinese Translation course inBusiness Chinese Department of Dhurakij Pundit University, Bangkok, The presentstudy combines the theories of error analysis, comparative linguistics, interlanguageand pragmatics to analyze the error types in Thai students’ Thai-Chinesetranslation.The Introduction briefly introduces the significance, current situations andresearch methodology of this study. Then a brief review of error analysis, comparativelinguistics and interlanguage theory is provided. Chapter Two firstly organizes andanalyzes students’ midterm and final examination paper, quizzes and homework inBusiness Chinese Department of Dhurakij Pundit University, Bangkok. Then aanalysis is conducted to catalogue the errors from the aspects of grammar, vocabulary,punctuation, cohesion and pragmatic translation. Chapter Three directly andobjectively discusses the causes contributed to the errors of Thai-Chinese translation.A summary of the causes is reached after the analysis from the following five aspects: (1) mother language interference,(2) students’ individual differences,(3) thedifferences of Thai-Chinese culture and mode of thinking,(4) unvarying teachingmethod, and (5) a lack of systematic translation textbooks. Chapter Four firstlyillustrated how Thai students reduce the errors during the process of translation fromthe aspects of students, teachers and textbooks, in order to decrease the production oferrors. Not only students should strengthen basic Chinese linguistic and culturalknowledge, but also teachers should improve their teaching skills and Thai-Chineseproficiency. It is advisable that teachers would provide effective teaching strategiesand contribute themselves to the researches of Thai-Chinese translation. The lastchapter summarizes the previous chapters and suggests the limitations andrecommendations of the present study.