Research into linguistic interference

participation is represented by the value 1.  
0
5
10
15
20
Se g m e n t A
Se g m e n t B
Se g m e n t C
M y p ar ticip atio n
Stu d e n ts
T e ach e r s
 
Graph 2: General consensus 
 
On average, the students marked 12 interferences in the text (the lowest 
value was 3 and the highest value reached 29). I have found 18 examples of 
interference in this translation and the teachers highlighted 25 interferences on 
average. Evidently, the teachers are generally more sensitive to interference 
than the students. The students quite differ in the perception of this 
phenomenon and the degree to which they are able to tolerate interference is 
obviously varying. It should be emphasized that in some cases the students 
marked even mistakes or discrepancies which were not caused by direct 
interference, indeed. To give examples of this phenomenon, it concerns the 
following passages: 
[...] there is no purpose in staging opportunities for a child to cry. – [...] není 
důvod, abychom svému dítěti příležitosti k pláči *organizovali.  
 
[...] [he] was peaceful about being apart from me. – [...] *byl srovnaný s tím, že 
byl ode mě oddělen
8
. 
                                                 
8
 The second part of the passage “[...] byl ode mě oddělen” is an interference and it was marked 
by 36% of the students.  

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80 
 
[...] we give supportive attention to the child’s fears and tears; – [...] *podpoříme 
se zájmem slzy a strach *našeho dítěte. 
 
Although these translations definitely sound weird, they are not examples of 
direct interference from English. The first sentence was marked by 32% of the 
students, the second and the third examples by 9% each. These examples 
appeared even in the teachers‟ versions. The subjects probably highlighted 
even the indirect interference; nevertheless, in this research and in the analysis 
of the students‟ translations, we have focused only on the direct influence from 
the source text.  
All of the cases which have been marked in my analysis of this text appear 
in the students‟ versions but some of them fall into the odd cases according to 
the students. For example, the phrase in addition to needing to nurse translated 
as kromě toho, že by potřeboval *pochovat was marked only by 18% of the 
people, whereas I consider it an example of clear lexical interference.  
I have not classified the students‟ choices according to the types so I will not 
draw conclusions regarding this aspect; but, generally, it can be stated that very 
often the choices contained a verb, or more concretely, the verb did not 
collocate with the subject. The students also noticed incorrect translations of 
word meanings, which means that the lexical aspect seemed important to them. 
Generally speaking, the results from the interference identification task show 
that the students‟ perception of interference in translations is quite subjective. 
Only 3 instances from the whole text fall into the class of general consensus. It 
seems that the degree to which the students are sensitive to interference 
depends largely on their individual views. The total numbers of interferences 
which they marked in the text were different in their versions (they ranged from 

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3 to 29). Moreover, some people, for example, marked cases which they 
personally felt disturbing but which were perfectly tolerable for other people 
(even for the teachers). The answers from the second task will be analysed in 
the following subchapter and we will see if any coherence between the results 
from these two tasks can be observed.