Ability of the Applied Science Undergraduate Students in Medan, Indonesia to Translate a Bilingual Abstract Text

Abstract

The students’ translation ability exerted influence on the competence of students in transferring the source language into the target language. This competency included two contexts, namely the translating skill with grammatical and lexical accuracies, and the translating competence followed in a translation quality standard. Grammatical and lexical accuracies were tested through grammar error analysis, while the translation quality was tested through message accuracy, message acceptance, and message readability. The purpose of this study was to analyze the translation ability of the Applied Science undergraduate students to translate bilingual abstract texts in their scientific papers. The students were majoring in the Civil Engineering, Building Construction Design Management Study Program in Medan State Polytechnic. This study applied the qualitative method of research, which focused on document analysis. The sampling used in this study was purposive. This study was adapted to the taxonomy errors typed theory proposed by Ferris, Liu, Sinha and Senna (2013) and the accuracy translation parameter theory proposed by Nababan, Nuraeni and Sumardiono (2012). The research data were taken from the translation of Indonesian abstract texts into English at the sentence structure level. The data sources were derived from the bilingual abstracts of the Applied Science undergraduate students majoring in D4 Civil Engineering. The research findings were expected to demonstrate the students’ translation abilities in terms of language mistakes, features in English Grammar translation, and the level of accuracy of the translated message.
 Keywords: grammatical error analysis, translation quality, translation ability, translating competence