CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS: AN INVESTIGATION OF ERROR ANALYSIS OF KURDISH AND PERSIAN SPEAKING STUDENTS MAJORING IN TRANSLATION (EFL)

The present study is an attempt to analyze errors made by Persian and Kurdish speaking students majoring in translation of English as a foreign language (EFL).The subjects of this study were 60 undergraduate translation students studying at the Islamic Azad University, Tonekabon branch, and also 30 undergraduate translation students studying at the Islamic Azad University, Sanandaj branch. The subjects were asked to translate different predetermined Persian sentences into English. Then, after administration of the test Dulay, Burt, and Krashen’s (1982) classifications model of error analysis for analyzing errors was used. Next, a chi-square test was run by SPSS software between two groups under the investigation, in order to reject or support the hypotheses of the study. The hypotheses in this study are: 1. the type, frequency, and percentage of errors of Kurdish and Persian speaking students of English are different: omission. 2. There are statistically significant differences between Kurdish and Persian speaking students majoring in translation in surface strategy classification (SSC) of errors: omission. The result of this study shows that interference from the learners’ mother tongue is the main cause of errors, confirming the strong version hypothesis of contrastive analysis. The final conclusion is that the EFL materials developed for the two groups under study should be different.