towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

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As the length of the texts translated varied, the exact
amount of time spent on each translation could not be
determined,
however, the average was three texts a month.
In EL I Course
students have five classes a week and each class lasts fifty
minutes. .The total number of classes per semester is 75 in each
group.
At. the end of each month students did their regular
monthly test, and, since we intended to gather enough evidence
of the problems involved in the translation of English texts,
one point was added to the number of points obtained in the
monthly test. That was an attempt to keep them interested in
providing the translations regularly. It is important to
emphasize that students are not obliged to produce the
translations of every text studied in class; they are required
to do so but not forced. They recognize translation as one of
the procedures to be used in EL I Course, end they also know
that in their monthly tests they usually have to translate
short passages as part of the evaluation
process applied to EL
I Course groups .
Our decision to take translation of the texts
administered in class rather than the short pieces of translation
required in monthly tests in order to comprise the corpus of our
research was due to two aspects: first, the translations of the
texts would give us a more comprehensive view of the kinds of
problems posed by ngps than the limited possibilities imposed
by the very length of the short passages to be translated in
four monthly tests; moreover, we would like
to gather a relevant
number of results so that they might be evaluated by
statistical
techniques; with longer passages students might have the .