Research into linguistic interference

 
Lexical interference  Syntactic interference 
Text A (11) 
53 
32 
Text B (21) 
21 
47 
Text C (10) 
56 
48 
Text D (10) 
41 
24 
Text E (8) 
17 
25 
Text F (17) 
95 
32 
TOTAL 
283 
208 
Table 8: Lexical and syntactic interference (The numbers in brackets stand for the number of 
students translating the text.) 
 
An interesting finding is that text B contains only 21 lexical interferences, 
although most people (21) translated this text. On the other hand, text F 
(translated by 17 students) contains 95 lexical interferences. The style of the 
text evidently plays an important role – in fact, text B does not contain many 
false friends or “tricky” lexical elements so the precondition for the manifestation 
of potential lexical interference is not so strong. On the other hand, the syntactic 
formulations in this text caused troubles to the students and the passages in 
which interference occurred were virtually the same in most of the translations. 

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Obviously, the style of the original largely influences the resulting amount of 
interferences in the target text. In contrast, text F is written in a different way 
from the stylistic point of view. Anthony Pym has a specific style of writing and, 
in this text, he utilizes irony and the words sometimes have a rather symbolic or 
abstract meaning. The students, thus, very often failed to express the concept 
correctly because they relied on the basic meaning.  
In proportion to the other types, lexical interference forms 36% of all the 
interferences occurring in the corpus and syntactic interference amounts to 
27%.  
Lexical  Syntactic  Grammatical  Borderline 
cases 
Interf. in 
Typography 
Miscellaneous 
36% 
27% 
11% 
8% 
8% 
11% 
Table 9: Proportions of individual types of interference 
According to the overall results (table 9), the other four types of interference 
are, more or less, at the same level. The actual occurrences in each text are 
shown in the following table:
 
 
Grammatical 
Interference 
Borderline 
cases 
Interference in 
typography 
Miscellaneous 
Text A (11) 
38 
12 
10 
9 
Text B (21) 
10 
7 
17 
33 
Text C (10) 
11 
16 
22 
26 
Text D (10) 
9 
5 
3 
0 
Text E (8) 
10 
6 
6 
3 
Text F (17) 
4 
15 
1 
13