Research into linguistic interference

4.1.  Corpus and Method 
The corpus consists of assignments done by students of translation. In other 
words, we will focus on the frequency of occurrence of interference in 
translations of the trainees during their progress towards proficiency. All of the 
students are of Czech nationality (i.e. Czech is their mother tongue) and study 
English as a foreign language. The materials for the corpus are taken from two 
courses (“Cultivating Translation Skills” and “Text and Discourse Analysis”) 
designed primarily for people studying Master‟s Degree in Translation at the 
Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. Both courses are dealing with L1 
translation, which means translation into the students‟ mother tongue (from 
English into Czech). This direction is considered the “more natural” process, 
compared to L2 translation; despite this fact, interference is quite frequent in 
students‟ translations. As far as the analysed texts are concerned, we will be 
dealing exclusively with non-literary translations. The corpus consists of six 
texts which were assigned to the students for translation in the two courses as 
weekly homework. Three of the texts served as assignments in the course 

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“Cultivating Translation Skills” and the other three translations were from the 
course entitled “Text and Discourse Analysis”. Altogether, the texts for 
translation contained 3,285 words (19,731 characters). We have analysed 77 
translations. The number of students translating individual texts was different for 
each translation and the following table shows the concrete figures.