An Analysis of Errors Made by Turkish and Persian Speaking EFL Students Majoring in Translation

The present Research investigates errors made by Persian (monolingual) and Turkish (bilingual) speaking students of English as a foreign language (EFL).The subjects of this study were 20 undergraduate translation students studying at the University of Tehran, and also 20 undergraduate translation students studying at the University of Tabriz. The subjects were asked to translate different predetermined Persian sentences into English. Then, after the administration of the test, Dulay, Burt, and Krashen’s (1982) and Keshavarz's classifications model of error analysis for analyzing errors were used. Next, the data were analyzed by running an independent samples test by SPSS in order to reject or support the hypotheses of the study. The hypotheses in this study are: 1.There are statistically significant differences between bilingual EFL learners’ and those made by monolingual EFL learners. 2. There are statistically significant differences between bilingual EFL learners’ morpho-syntactic errors and those made by monolingual EFL learners. The result of this study shows that the learners of the target language deviate from TL rules, so we can say that interference from their mother tongue is not the core cause of the two groups’ errors under the investigation, although there are some differences between the two groups’ errors, they are not statistically significant.