A Study on Reverse Translation Performance from English to Korean Back to English

Abstract

This study sought to explore what kind of reverse translation techniques the college students used for translating from English(L2) to Korean(L1) and back to English(L2). In addition, it examined what type of grammatical errors the students made when they translated their Korean translation back to the target language(English). To those ends, 36 English Education major students were asked to translate the original English text to Korean, and a week later they translated their Korean translation back to the target language(English). After that, the collected data were analyzed. One of the findings was that when the students translated the text from English to Korean, they used transposition the most, followed by modulation, literal translation, and borrowing. Another finding was that omission was the most frequent type of errors made by the students, followed by misformation and addition. Omission and misformation consisted of more than 90 percent of the errors. The least frequent category of errors was misordering. The findings of the study suggest reverse translation can benefit as one of the classroom activities.