COMMON MISTAKES IN ENGLISH-BULGARIAN TRANSLATION

Abstract

The paper focuses on the translation-translator relation as a way to explain the mistakes that Bulgarian learners make in translation English texts into Bulgarian. What does it mean to be a good translator? First and foremost, it means that a translator is a kind of a co-author. So he is responsible for the accuracy, clarity, naturalness and acceptability of the translated text. Translators are people who have to interpret the text in the most accurate way in the target language so that the text will remain as close as possible to the source language. On the other hand, a translator should also be able to recreate the text using his own means, to use idiomatic expressions if necessary in order to avoid literary translation. He should be able to use his imagination and implement a sense of balance between precision and the natural sound of the translation. The question that arises is what skills are needed to promote translating ability.
The purpose of the paper is to review recent research in the dynamics of translation. All subjects were Bulgarian learners of English and were recruited in one academic year (October 2020 – April 2021). The participants were students in English Studies at the University of Shumen, in their second year of education whose CEFR level was taken into consideration with respect to their background linguistic and pragmatic awareness.
The analysis of the Learner Corpus reveals several common mistakes that are made when translating texts from English to Bulgarian and this paper means to point them out. These include the inability to differentiate between a good and a bad translation, the “I give up” translation, exaggerating or misunderstanding the meaning of some words, ambiguity, replacing the Bulgarian word with the English one, keeping the original English word order after translation, ignorance of basic Internet terms, online sources, or cultural unawareness, as well as literal translation.
The paper comes to the conclusion that it is the translators’ task to create conditions under which the source language author and the target language reader can interact with one another. Translation studies have been recognised as an important discipline, which is separate from foreign language studies.