An analysis of students’ grammatical errors in translating Indonesian recount text into English made by the first grade of senior high school

Abstract

This research was aimed at finding out types of grammatical errors and investigating types of errors that were most and least frequently made by students based on Communicative Effect Taxonomy that were found in students’ recount text translation as well as figuring out the causes of those errors. The subjects of this research were the first-grade students of SMAN 1 Pringsewu in the academic year 2020/2021. This research adopted a descriptive qualitative method by using a translation task and questionnaire as the instruments. The results revealed that the students committed all error types in terms of Communicative Effect Taxonomy: global error and local error. Local errors were more dominating than global errors. The possible causes of those errors were problems in the target language, mother-tongue interference, lack of eagerness to learn the target language, lack of confidence, and the absence of error feedback from the teacher. This suggests that the student’s knowledge of English grammar was still low. Therefore, the English teacher is expected to solve it by providing appropriate teaching methods and materials to minimize the errors. Keywords: Error Analysis, Communicative Effect Taxonomy, Translation