Error analysis is the process of determining the incidence, cause, and consequences of unsuccessful language: French Translation and Strategies Essay, DCU, Ireland

Error analysis is the process of determining the incidence, cause, and consequences of unsuccessful language. This linguistic discipline has been applied to many research fields, such as Foreign Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning and Teaching since errors contain valuable information on the strategies that people use to acquire a language and, at the same time, allow the identification of points that need further work.

In fact, according to Richards, “At the level of pragmatic classroom experience, error analysis will continue to provide one means by which the teacher assesses learning and teaching and determines priorities for future effort”.

More recently, error analysis has also become a focus of research in the machine translation area, where some work is dedicated to the design of taxonomies and others target error identification. In this paper, we present a
linguistically motivated taxonomy for translation errors that extends previous ones. Contrary to other approaches, our proposal:

• Clusters different types of errors in the main areas of linguistics, allowing the precise specification of the information level needed to identify the errors and simplify possible extensions.
• Allows the classification of errors that occur in Romance languages and not only English.
• allows the consideration of a language’s variations.