Analyse des erreurs de ponctuation dans les traductions Des étudiants bilingues de l’université de Yaoundé I

Abstract

This endeavour is a contrastive linguistics study which aims at analysing punctuation errors in translation works by a population of third level bilingual students in the University of Yaounde I. it also aims at finding out the reasons behind the flaws in those students’ output. The study draws from a corpus gathered from the 2020-2021 exam session in translation studies. A couple of texts, one in English and another in French were given to the population mentioned above. The data that have been collected were instrumental in detecting errors in line with capitalisation of words and the use of punctuation signs. We further noticed that the rate of capital letters errors was up to 80% and that punctuation errors have reached 70%. The analyses carried out reveal that the informants display learning difficulties in punctuation both in English and in French. The discussion grounded on the hypothesis that the students have no mastery of contrastive punctuation has been confirmed by the informant’s tendency to apply the punctuation pattern of the source text into the target text. This trend is detrimental to translation outputs as far as semantics and syntax are concerned