An Error Analysis Case Study: Out of context translation of Persian sentences into English for Elementary EFL Learners

This study aims at analyzing the errors committed by the Iranian elementary EFL learners. The present investigation not only takes the types of errors committed but also tries to shed as much light on the sources of these errors. To this end a worksheet of ten Persian sentences that have been translated from the original English content of the learners’ course book have been given to a class of twenty students. This group of students was at the elementary level of English. The learners were supposed to translate each sentence back into English. The researcher then had to analyze each translated sentence with regard to three aspects of grammar, choice of words and spelling. The next step was to categorizing the errors and finding the frequency of each of them. The results indicated that errors in the use of articles are the most frequent ones (20% of the total number of errors), followed by the wrong uses of verbs (18.66%), and wrong use of the tense (10.66%). According to the findings correct use of articles should be focused in the EFL context more often and the use of correct verbs and tenses should be totally clarified and emphasized as well

Keywords:

error analysis , contrastive analysis , EFL , translation