Research into linguistic interference

 
Text A  Text B  Text C  Text D  Text E  Text F 
Number of students 
11 
21 
10 
10 
8 
17 
Table 1: Number of students translating individual texts 
 
As far as the concrete types of texts are concerned, text A is a passage 
taken from a science magazine article dealing with conservation in New 
Zealand, text B is a journal article focusing on theories of anthropomorphism in 
design, text C is an internet discussion of two Japanese scientists dealing with 
robotics, text D is a chapter (Separation Anxiety and the Need to Cry) from a 
book called “Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves” by Naomi Aldort 
(focusing on parent-child relationships), text E is an article written on the 
occasion of the death of Robert Holdstock, an English fantasy author. It was 
called In Praise of Robert Holdstock and it was published on the guardian.co.uk. 
And, finally, text F is a passage from Anthony Pym‟s book “Method in 
Translation History”, dealing with getting funding for a research project and 
writing research proposals.  
Concerning the method of analysis and the concrete work with the corpus, 
we will analyse translations done by individual people, mark interferences 
occurring in each, classify them according to the type and summarize them in 
terms of frequency of particular interferential types. Some of the students‟ 

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names repeat and we will observe their individual results and their tendencies. 
Nevertheless, we will deal with their assignments anonymously (we will 
preserve only the students‟ initials). Of course, analysing translations from the 
point of view of a concrete person‟s progress is also possible and it would be 
interesting to see how interference changes in time (e.g. concentrate on a given 
group of students, their translations during several semesters or throughout 
their studies, and evaluate it from this point of view); but, for such a research a 
rather long time-span would be needed so we will look at interference from a 
rather more general perspective and focus on the types of it. Nevertheless, the 
method mentioned could serve as a suggestion for a future research topic. To 
specify the method once again, we will deal with the students‟ translations 
anonymously; in other words, we will put the development of concrete people 
aside and we will evaluate the issue of interference rather generally as a 
problem which persists in students‟ translations and which can be eliminated by 
training and gaining experience. We are looking at how interference manifests 
in their translations. It will be interesting to see which type of interference occurs 
with the greatest frequency, whether the style of a source text affects the 
occurrence of interference and whether some of the students manifest personal 
inclinations to one of the types. When we will find out what level causes 
students the biggest problems, it will be possible to give them advice and to 
warn them against concrete features.  
As far as the actual corpus analysis is concerned, we collected the 
translations and assessed them in terms of interference. The main criteria for 
identifying interferences are the following: either the text sounds unnatural (as 
has already been mentioned above, this feature very often serves as a marker 

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of interference) and we sometimes recognize interference even without reading 
the source text, or the text is incomprehensible and the meaning is 
inappropriate due to literal translation. We then marked places where 
interference occurred and put these examples into a table (see the enclosed 
CD) showing the TT passage on the left and the corresponding ST on the right; 
which means that we worked with the texts (STs and TTs) in parallel. Finally, 
these instances have been classified according to the types of interference 
specified in the following chapter.