Linguistic and Cultural Differences Influencing Thai to English Translation: On the Qualitative Data Suggesting Techniques Employed by Third Year Students, Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University, Thailand

Abstract

Linguistic and cultural differences between Thai and English underlie expected errors through both formal and informal observations of language productions in the Thai context. In a Thai-to-English translation task by 138 participants, contrastive analysis is used to analyze the structural similarities and differences between the source language and the target language together with error analysis and interlanguage theories (Spolsky, 1979; Lennon, 2008; Gass & Selinker, 2008; Kantè, 2014; Kantè, 2015) attempting to investigate the interlanguage system of the participants while dealing with the task in hand. With the use of formal cooperative learning groups under the Cooperative Language Learning method (Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 192-201) outside of the classroom for data collection, this 7-week long group work project of short story translation was assigned to third year students to see types of errors produced. The qualitative data indicate sources of L2 productions including direct translation, a lack of knowledge on grammatical features of lexical choices, overgeneralization of and innovations in culture-specific items, and rare exposure to target choices. The findings further suggest that the participants were prone to rely heavily on online translation machines or software and either online or printed dictionaries where all possible choices are provided without looking more carefully at which choices are appropriate for a certain context. In addition, for a task outside of the classroom in the digital age with easy online accessibility and distant teachers’ supervision, the ethical issue on plagiarism is to be intensively emphasized.