omission

Writing is considered one of the most difficult skills in EFL/ESL. Thus, meticulous recognition and classification of students’ errors in certain contexts is a worthwhile endeavor which provides us with both diagnostic and prognostic power. Accordingly, a total of 430 students in 15 English writing classes held during 12 consecutive semesters in a private university in central Taiwan were the subjects of this study. They composed 5703 essays which were rated and coded by the authors. Adopting and modifying the error taxonomy proposed by Zheng & Park (2013), the authors classified a sum of 63460 errors into four main groups with their subsequent subcategories. This study revealed that the highest problematic areas for Taiwanese university students were ‘misformation’ with 51.55% of the whole including errors in tenses, parts of speech, prepositions, subject/verb agreements, and run-on sentences. Then, ‘omission’ errors ranked second with 21.30% including errors in articles, plural suffix-s, and relative pronouns. Finally, the third and fourth error types were ‘others’ with 15.13% including spelling, capitalization, and wrong vocabulary, and ‘addition’ with 12.01% containing errors in articles, unnecessary words, and conjunctions. This study provides numerous genuine samples from the students’ compositions being annotated based on the applied error taxonomy. Thus, the data presented in this study can provide researchers with a practical framework for future studies in error analysis, as well as pedagogical implications in the field.

The novel Les Miserables (Hugo, 1985) is one of the most universally translated works, and there are a number of adaptions in several languages. One recent adaption is the Persian musical play performed in Iran. In this performance, culture-specific items (CSIs) were translated differently since visual and aural elements were added to the stage. The present study aims to investigate translation strategies used in the above adaptation to indicate what translation solutions are possible when the medium changes. After watching the ninety-minute recorded play in VOD format, culture-specific items were selected purposively corresponding to those in the novel. Subsequently, they were analyzed based on Newmark's model (1988). The findings showed that the most frequent translation strategies applied were adaptation, followed by communicative translation, and literal translation. Compared with the original performance, some scenes were deleted from the recorded play. Hence, there was no exact one-to-one correspondence with the original text of the book. While instances of censorship contributed to some of these omissions, probably one reason for the issue is the publishing regulations administered in Iran for VOD formats of the plays. These results suggest that while target language-oriented strategies dominated the entire translation approach, the translator of the play tried to familiarize the audience with French culture through literal translations and with the help of visual and aural aids. Since the audience were presented with pictures and songs, it was easier for them to locate themselves in the era of the French Revolution and French customs.