Research into linguistic interference

4.  ANALYSIS 
This chapter will be devoted to the research and analysis of the corpus. The 
research consists of three major parts: the corpus analysis with classification of 
interference according to the types outlined in chapter 4.2., the interference 
identification task (students and teachers were supposed to mark interferences 
in one of the translations from the corpus) and the questionnaire concerning 
students‟ awareness of interference. As far as the concrete outline of this 
chapter is concerned, first, the corpus containing texts for analysis and the 
method of research will be presented, and second, the types of interference, 
according to which the examples from the corpus are classified, will be defined. 
The concrete results of the analysis will be discussed later in chapter 5; and 
answers from the questionnaires, given to the students of translation, and 
results from the task mentioned above will be summarized in chapter 6. 
As we have already mentioned in the chapter concerning Levý‟s concept, 
there are two types of interference – direct and indirect. To make this clear, in 
this research, we will analyse direct interference, i.e. direct influence from the 
source text. Interference, in some cases, can be detected even without looking 
at the original text, just by reading the final product. The passage, in which 
interference occurs, sounds rather unnatural and the influence from English is 
sometimes evident even without knowing the original text. Nevertheless, in this 
research, interferences will be assessed in parallel with the source text. As we 
will see on the actual examples, the seriousness of a mistake caused by 
interference can be diverse – from “mistakes” which cause that the text is 
clumsy, but which preserve the meaning of the original, to errors which 
completely change the sense of the source text. An expression, a phrase or a 

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sentence is translated literally without considering the meaning of the context 
and the original idea is thus changed. This is just to explain what the character 
of mistakes caused by interference may be.  
This research uses the descriptive approach to: we do not want to “criticize 
bad translations” but to explore this phenomenon in students‟ translations; to 
see how it manifests in their works, offer a list of possible classifications of 
interferential types and to analyse their frequency. Moreover, we will focus on 
students‟ perception of interference and their attitude towards it.