Teaching semantic considerations of ablative and locative cases in Turkish-to-English translated texts

Abstract

Translation aims to transmit the original tone of the source text both syntactically and semantically accurate without losing the intent of a message. However, some syntactic considerations such as cases may pose a problem particularly if the source and target texts belong to different language typologies. Accordingly, this study investigated the translation of ablative and locative cases in Turkish-to-English studies to find out and analyse erroneous samples. The population of the study is composed of 131 students at the department of translation and the 360 pages data were gathered through different translation activities. Taxonomy with three categorizations was constructed for the identification and classification of the data, which are inaccurate cases, redundant cases, and case-missing. Results showed that ablative and locative cases had a similar number of errors in translation from Turkish to English, and inaccurate cases made up of the large proportion of these errors. This study concluded that there are a few considerations regarding ablative and locative cases that need to be taken into account while rendering a text. At last, some pedagogical implications aiming at lowering students’ errors of translation relating to ablative and locative cases were suggested.