Research into linguistic interference

4.2.5.  Interference in Typography 
Interference in typography differs quite considerably from the previously 
mentioned types because it is not the truly linguistic issue; it has nothing to do 
with the formulation of a sentence or translation of lexical units but it concerns 
the formal rules and norms of the two languages in contact. Nevertheless, even 
this aspect of translation will be explored because the formal appearance is an 
essential part of translation and interferences on this level still persist among 
students. This group of interference includes mainly punctuation and capital 
letters. Very often the students ignore these differences and preserve the 
typographical norms from the source text. Even though it is quite easy to avoid 
this type of interference, students very often pay too much attention to the 
lexical and syntactic level of a translation and forget about the formal aspect. 
Certainly, this type of interference is a result of inattention and careless re-
readings of the final product.  
The incorrect usage of punctuation represents the most typical occurrence 
of this type of interference. Generally speaking, commas and quotation marks 
are the most frequent examples in the corpus. When a comma appears in the 
source text, students automatically tend to insert it also in the target text. 
Moreover, during the analysis of the corpus, it has been realized that even the 
opposite phenomenon occurred in the translations – sentences which do not 
require a comma in English miss it even in Czech, where it is essential (e.g. [...] 
to explain things we do not understand in terms that we do understand [...] – [...] 
vysvětlit věci jimž nerozumíme způsobem pro nás pochopitelným.). 
Nevertheless, we do not count these examples in the analysis because an 
absence of a comma does not have to be caused strictly by interference.  

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Here are at least some examples of typographical interferences from the 
corpus: 
His book “The Future Astroboy” [...] – Jeho kniha “Astrochlapec budoucnosti” 
[...] 
 
“[…] we usually lose little”.  – „[…] obvykle toho moc neztratíme”. 
 
Of course, this is just a hypothesis. – Samozřejmě, to vše je jen má hypotéza. 
 
As we make robots, we will actually be exploring the mechanism [...] – Při 
výrobě robotů, budeme vlastně zkoumat mechanismy [...] 
 
[...] that would, in pre-pestilent times, have powered the procreation [...] – [...] 
které by, v době před těmito zhoubnými nájezdy, byly zásobami pro 
rozmnožování [...] 
 
United States – Spojené Státy 
 
New Zealand forest – Novozélandských lesů 
 
Typographical interference definitely deserves more attention because, as 
evident from the result of the research, students still make errors of this type. 
Although it is a fundamental mistake, they probably focus more on the linguistic 
level of translation and become easily influenced by the formal aspect of the 
original text.