The Comprehension of English Syntactic and Grammatical Influences on English-Thai Translation among English Majors at Burapha University

Abstract

The research sought to determine the comprehension of English syntactic and grammatical influences on English-Thai translation among 115 English majors at Burapha University. The data were obtained from the translation tests on syntactic and grammatical points, collected in two phases as for pre-test scores and post-test scores.
The data were statistically analyzed to identify each type of errors and the frequency distribution of a data value. The pre-test analysis revealed the top five most frequent syntactic and grammatical errors on translation, a reflection of their comprehension levels. They were articles (f=114, 99.1%), ellipses (f=113, 98.3%), non-count nouns (f=113, 98.3%), non-count nouns (f=112, 97.4%), and articles (f=108, 93.9%), respectively. The top five most frequent syntactic and grammatical errors on translation were also identified in the post-test analysis as follows: non-count nouns (f=113, 98.3%), articles (f=108, 93.9%), non-count nouns (f=106, 92.2%), ellipses (f=101, 87.8%), and ellipses (f=99, 86.1%), respectively.   
The comparison of the differences between the post-test and pre-test scores was made. The difference analyses indicated the post-test scores were greater than the pre-test scores on punctuation, articles, nouns, passive voice, present participial phrases, past participial phrases, ellipses and empty/ dummy subjects. The post-test scores were less than the pre-test ones on modals while verb tenses showed no difference scores between the two analyses.