Tài liệu Misinterpretations in translating ambiguous sentences by can tho university english majors

CAN THO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ….. ….. MISINTERPRETATIONS IN TRANSLATING AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES BY CAN THO UNIVERSITY ENGLISH MAJORS B.A.Thesis Supervisor: Lưu Hoàng Anh, M.A. Student: Nguyễn Thị Cương Code: 7062896 B.Ed. Class NN0652A1 Course: 32 Can Tho, April 2010 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.......................................................................... page iii ABSTRACT................................................................................................. page iv LIST OF CHARTS, TABLES AND CHARTS ............................................ page v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ....................................................... page 1 1.1 Rationale ........................................................................................ page 1 1.2 Research aims ............................................................................... page 2 1. 3 Research questions ........................................................................ page 2 1.4 Research hypotheses....................................................................... page 2 1.5 Research organization .................................................................... page 2 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................... page 3 2.1 Some definitions of translation ....................................................... page 3 2.2 Process of translation ..................................................................... page 3 2.3 Translation method ........................................................................ page 4 2.4 Definition of ambiguity .................................................................. page 4 2.5 Lexical ambiguity and its types ...................................................... page 5 2.5.1 Definition of lexical ambiguity ..................................... page 5 2.5.2 Types of lexical ambiguity............................................ page 5 2.5.2.1 Polysemy .......................................................... page 5 2.5.2.2 Homonymy....................................................... page 5 2.6 Structural ambiguity and its types .................................................. page 6 2.6.1 Definition of structural ambiguity ................................. page 6 2.6.2 Types of structural ambiguity ....................................... page 6 2.6.2.1 Attachment ambiguity ...................................... page 6 2.6.2.2 Gap-finding and filling ambiguity .................... page 7 2.6.2.3 Coordination ambiguity .................................... page 7 2.7 Ambiguity in translation ................................................................ page 7 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY ................................................. page 9 3.1 Research design .............................................................................. page 9 3.2 Research participants...................................................................... page 9 3.2.1 Student participants ...................................................... page 9 3.2.2 Teacher participants ...................................................... page 9 3.3 Research instruments...................................................................... page 9 i 3.3.1 Translation test ............................................................... page 9 3.3.2 Interview ........................................................................ page 10 3.4 Research procedure ........................................................................ page 10 3.5 Data analysis .................................................................................. page 11 CHAPTER FOUR: RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION .............. page 12 4.1 Students’ problems with ambiguity ................................................ page 12 4.2 Differences in the score between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity ........................................................................................ page 13 4.2.1 The test result in lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity ............................................................................... page 13 4.2.2 An analysis of each item................................................. page 14 4.3 Recommendations .......................................................................... page 23 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSIONS ........................................................ page 25 5.1 Discussions ................................................................................... page 25 5.2 Limitations ..................................................................................... page 26 5.3 Suggestions for Further research .................................................... page 26 APPENDICES ............................................................................................ page 28 APPENDIX 1: Translation test............................................................. page 28 APPENDIX 2: Answer keys for translation test ................................... page 30 APPENDIX 3: The scale to score the translation test ........................... page 32 APPENDIX 4: Interview questions ...................................................... page 33 APPENDIX 5: The table of test result .................................................. page 34 APPENDIX 6: Scale: all variables ....................................................... page 36 REFERENCES ........................................................................................... page 38 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In writing the thesis, I acknowledged the help from a number of people; their influence remains in the new version. Firstly, I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Luu Hoang Anh M.A., for her constructive comments and criticism in the most positive and encouraging fashion. Secondly, I would like to express my great thanks to Huynh Trung Tin M.A. and Vuong Le Thien Thanh M.A., for their valuable help, when I collected the data. Many thanks go to Truong Nguye Quynh Nhu M.A. and Le Thi Huyen M.A., for their valuable suggestions to make the research better. Thirdly, I was extremely fortunate to get the comments from teachers of Can Tho University, especially those of the English Education Department, who helped me with innumerous ways during the research and choose the research topic. Next, many thanks go to all CTU four-year English students (course 32) who took part in the translation test and contributed a great deal to the completion of this study. I only hope that they will look upon the results of their influence with pleasure. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and friends for their support in different ways during the time I carried out this research. All the best, Can Tho, April 2010 Nguyen Thi Cuong iii ABSTRACT Lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity are complicated and appear not only in literature but also in our daily speech. Therefore, they raise a lot of difficulties such as misinterpretation, mistranslation and confusion for learners, especially in translation. The purposes of the study is to find out the problems that lead students to confusion and difficulties in translating ambiguous sentences and then analyze the problems to withdraw some suggested ways to help students perform well in their translation. In order to carry out the survey, 70 seniors majoring in English Language Studies at Can Tho University were chosen as the subjects. At the first stage, the research instrument was the translation test which included 20 sentences divided into 2 parts: lexical ambiguity (ten items) and structural ambiguity (ten items). According to their results of translation test, their marks were classified into three classes: below average, average and above average. During the process of analysis, the researcher recognized that most of the students did not translate lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity well. Most of the students’ translation were divergent and reflected the sentence meanings differently toward the meanings of the source text. The data collected proved that lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity were difficult to translators. It also revealed that between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity, the lexical ambiguity was more problematic to students. At the second stage, interview was conducted to translation teachers and some students to withdraw some possible ways to help learners overcome their problems in translating ambiguous sentences. iv LIST OF CHARTS, TABLES AND FIGURES Chart 1.1: The process of translation ........................................................... page 3 Table 4.1: Descriptive statistics of the test performance .............................. page 12 Table 4.2: Descriptive statistics of the mean scores of lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity .............................................................. page 13 Table 3.1: The distribution of types of lexical ambiguity and the scores ..... page 32 Table 4.3: Students’ score ........................................................................... page 35 Table 4.4: Case processing summary ........................................................... page 37 Table 4.5: Reliability statistics ..................................................................... page 37 Table 4.6: Item statistics .............................................................................. page 37 Table 4.7: Summary item statistics .............................................................. page 37 Table 4.8: Item-total statistics ..................................................................... page 37 Table 4.9: Scale Statistics ............................................................................ page 37 Figure 4.1: The mean scores of lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity . page 13 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter begins with the rationale that the researcher chooses this field to study, and then the research aims, research questions and some research hypotheses. It ends with the research organization to help the readers know how this research is organized. 1.1 Rationale Translation is a complicated field. During four years at university, many students have been fully equipped with the knowledge of Linguistic such as An Introduction to Language, Morphology, Semantics, Syntax, Phonology and Theory of Translation, so they are able to translate exactly and fluently thanks to their understanding of language meaning and language uses. However, to Lam Quang Dong (http://ngonngu.net), a good translation at present, in the journal about “Về tính chuyên nghiệp của nghề dịch thuật”, there are a few good translators who can do the translation with high quality. Besides, if we take part in a translation forum, we will really recognize that many students seldom succeed in translating even when it is a simple sentence. Particularly, they have some problems in translation that stem from the fact that ambiguity in sentence raises confusion and many other difficulties for those who have learnt English as a foreign language. Moreover, human language contains ambiguity at many levels of linguistic representation. (Altmann, 1990; Small, Cottrell, & Tanenhause, 1998). Ambiguity arises in the sentence when more than one interpretation, so translators can not decide which meaning should be understood. One of the most significant issues that every translator should take account of is lexical ambiguity (homonymy and polysemy) and structural ambiguity (attachment ambiguity, gap-finding and filling ambiguity and coordination ambiguity), because when a sentence contains ambiguity, it may have more than one meaning. Furthermore, if a word or a sentence contains modifiers, the translators don’t know what the modifiers are attached to. Also, different attachments in the sentence may have more than one meaning. These are the problems that not only the translators but also the teacher as well as students including the researcher usually face in the translation, so in this study, the researcher would like to find out whether the last-year English major students have these problems in translation, and between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity, which one is more problematic. The researcher 1 also hopes to present some solutions to help translator overcome them. Therefore, the research titled “An Investigation of Ambiguity in Translation of English-Major Students” was conducted. 1.2 Research aims The researcher is expected to get three aims. First, it is very necessary to conduct the research to recognize whether the lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity are problematic to English major students at Can Tho University or not. Second, the researcher wants to find out which ambiguity is more problematic to students, lexical ambiguity or structural ambiguity. Third, the researcher wants to withdraw some recommendations to help students translate the ambiguous sentences better. 1.3 Research questions In the study, the researcher will try to answer the following questions: 1. Are lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity problematic to English major students? 2. Between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity, which one is more problematic? 3. What are some possible ways to help translators overcome their problems of ambiguity in translation? 1.4 Research hypotheses When conducting this research, the researcher formulated these hypotheses. First, the students face problems in lexical and structural ambiguity when translating. Second, between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity, lexical ambiguity is more problematic to students. Third, the respondents will give a lot of possible ways of overcoming ambiguity problems. 1.5 Research organization The study consists of 5 chapters: Introduction, Literature Review, Research Methodology, Results, Discussions, Limitations and Suggestions for Further Practice. Chapter one: Introduction generalizes the rationale, research aims, research questions, research hypotheses and research organization. Chapter two: Literature Review provides the background to the research questions. Chapter three: Research Methodology includes a description of design, participants, instruments and procedures of the research. Chapter four: Results analyzes the results of the translation test. Chapter five: Discussions, Limitations and Suggestions for Further Practice 2 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW Being a key to open the door to all development of the study, part one will start by giving some definitions of translation. Next, it will introduce process of translation. Some definitions and typical types of lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity and ambiguity in translation will be presented in the next parts. 2.1 Some definitions of translation Prochazkas (as cited in Lawrence Venuit, 2001, p. 131) defines a good translation in terms of certain requirements which must be made of the translator, namely:(1) “He must understand the original words thematically and stylistically”, (2) “He must overcome the differences between the two linguistic structures” and (3) “He must reconstruct the stylistic structures of the original words in his translation”. A next definition of translation is that “Translation is the replacement of a representation of a test in one language by a representation of an equivalent text in a second language” (Bell, 1991). “Translation (from http:www.completetranslation.com) is the accurate rendering of a document into another language so that it is suitable for its intended purpose. To be effective, a translation must be accurate and complete but also grammatically correct, stylistically appropriate and terminologically consistent.” 2.2 Process of translation “Translation consists of studying the lexicon, grammatical structure, communication situation, and cultural context of the source language text, analyzing it in order to determine its meaning, and then reconstructing this same meaning using the lexicon and grammatical structure which are appropriate in the receptor language and its cultural context.” (Larson, l998, p. 3) Chart 1: Process of translation (Larson, l998, p. 4) 3 As illustrated in this chart, translation is a process based on the theory that it is possible to abstract the meaning of a text from its forms and reproduce that meaning with the very different forms of a second language. In this translation process, meaning is a very important factor deciding the fidelity of any translation. 2.3 The translation methods (NewMark, 2001) Here are some typical translation methods normally used in translating. Word-for-word translation: The source language word-order is preserved and the words translated singly by their most common meanings, out of context. Literal translation: The source language grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest target language equivalents but the lexical words are again translated singly, out of context. Faithful translation: A faithful translation attempts to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the target language grammatical structures. It “transfers” cultural words and preserves the degree of grammatical and lexical “abnormality” in the translation. Semantic translation: Semantic translation must take more account of the aesthetic value (that is, the beautiful and natural sound) of the source language text, compromising on “meaning” where appropriate so that no assonance, word-play or repetition jars in the finished version. Free translation: Free translation reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without the form of the original. Usually it is a paraphrase much longer than the original, a so-called “intralingual translation”, often prolix and pretentious, and not translation at all. Communicative translation: Communicative translation attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership. Service translation: That is translation from one’s language habitual use into another language. Information translation: This conveys all the information in a non-literary text, sometimes rearranged in a more logical form, sometimes partially summarized, and not a form of a paraphrase. 2.4 Definitions of ambiguity Ambiguity is an expression whose meaning cannot be determined from its context. In other words, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one 4 meaning (Le, 2003). An example for ambiguous word is that the word “light” can mean “not very heavy” or “not very dark”. An example for ambiguous phrase is that the phrase “an old English teacher” can mean an old teacher/ experienced teacher who is from England or an old teacher/ experienced teacher who teaches English language or a teacher who teaches the old English language. The ambiguous sentence “Sherlock saw the man using binoculars.” can mean whether Sherlock saw the man who has binoculars or Sherlock used binoculars to see the man. There are many kinds of ambiguity in English, but in the study, the researcher only focus on presenting lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity. In the next part, the definition of lexical ambiguity and its types will be looked at. 2.5 Lexical ambiguity and types of lexical ambiguity 2.5.1 Definition of lexical ambiguity Lexical ambiguity is the ambiguity of an individual word or phrase that can be used (in different contexts) to express two or more different meanings (Small, Cottrell & Tanenhause, 1988). A good example is that “she cannot bear children” means whether she is unable to give birth to children or she cannot stand children, because it contains the ambiguous word “bear” with two possible meanings. 2.5.2 Types of lexical ambiguity Lexical ambiguity can be further subdivided into homonymy and polysemy. 2.5.2.1 Polysemy Polysemy occurs when a word has several related meanings but one etymology. The different meanings of a polysemic expression have a base meaning in common (Small, Cottrell & Tanenhause, 1988). An example is that the word “point” can mean “punctuation mark”, “sharp end”, “detail”, and “argument". 2.5.2.2 Homonymy Homonymy occurs when two different words have the same written and phonetic representation, but unrelated meanings, different etymologies, and different histories of development. Each of the homonyms has its own semantics (Small, Cottrell & Tanenhause, 1988). For example, “bark” means both “the noise a dog makes” and “the stuff on the outside of a tree”. Homonyms consist of homograph and homophones. However, the study focuses on the problems in written translation not in oral translation. Therefore, the case of homophone will be ignored because this case can be recognized easily when it is 5 written. It may not create challenge for translators. The study focuses on homograph which causes difficulties for students in translation from English to Vietnamese. Homographs are words that are spelled the same yet have different meanings. They may be pronounced differently in speech (Small, Cottrell & Tanenhause, 1988). For example, the word “watch” functions as the verb which means “look at closely” or the noun which means “portable timepiece for the wrist or pocket.” The lexical ambiguity and its types have just been presented above, and the next part is the definition of structural ambiguity and its types. 2.6 Structural ambiguity and types of structural ambiguity 2.6.1 Definition of structural ambiguity Structural ambiguity arises when a complex phrase or a sentence can be parsed in more than one way (Hirst, 1992). An example is that “He ate the cookies on the couch.” It could mean whether he ate those cookies which were on the couch, or he was sitting on the couch when he ate the cookies. 2.6. 2 Types of structural ambiguity There are many types of structural ambiguity in English, but its three types (attachment ambiguity, gap finding and filling ambiguity and coordination ambiguity) are chosen to examine. The first type presented is attachment ambiguity. 2.6.2.1 Attachment ambiguity The first class of structural ambiguity is attachment ambiguity. There is more than one node to which a particular syntactic constituent may legally be attached. Attachment problems are mostly problems of modifier placement. The most common example is that a prepositional phrase may either modify a verb or an immediately preceding noun phrase (Hirst, 1992). The sentence “Mary saw the man with the telescope.” is a typical example. The preposition phrase “with the telescope” is either a manner adverbial modifying the verb “saw”, or preposition phrase modifying the noun “the man”. It means whether Mary uses the telescope to see the man or Mary saw the man who has the telescope. Here is the other occasion on which attachment ambiguity may occur. When a sentence contains a sub-sentence, both may contain places for the attachment of prepositional phrase or adverb (Hirst, 1992). A good example for this case is that: “Madia knew that Ross fried the chicken with garlic.” In this example, the preposition phrase “with garlic” can be attached to the verb “knew” or “fried” or the noun 6 (object) “the chicken”. As a result, it means whether Madia biết rằng Ross đã chiên thịt gà với tỏi or Madia biết rằng Ross đã chiên thịt gà mà đã được ướp tỏi sẵn. 2.6.2.2 Gap-finding and filling ambiguity Gap-finding ambiguities occur when a moved constituent has to be returned to its pre-transformational starting point, and there is more than one place that it might go (Ford, Bresnan, and Kaplan, 1982). A good instance is that “Those are the girls that the police debated about fighting.” In this sentence, there are two possible gaps in the relative clause which we denote by that the relative pronoun (whose referent is underlined) may fill: Those are the girls that the police debated about fighting . Taking the first gap means the police debated with the girls on the topic of fighting. The second gap means the police debated among themselves about fighting the girls. 2.6.2.3 Coordination ambiguity Coordination ambiguity is the ambiguity that occurs from the use of coordinators such as and and or. In other words, ambiguity occurs when more than one conjunction like “and” or “or” is used in a sentence “I saw Peter and Paul and Mary saw me.”, or when one conjunction is used with a modifier “young man and woman”. Words and phrases of all types can be coordinated (Okumura & Muraki, 1994), with the external modifier being a word or phrase of almost any type and appearing either before or after the coordination. In this sentence: “Assumptions and dependencies that are of importance.” the external modifier “that are of importance” may apply either to both “assumptions and dependencies” or to “dependences”. The lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity have showed above. In order to know some problems that translators usually face when translating ambiguous sentences, we will consider the following part. 2.7 Ambiguity in translation Translation is a complex process of transferring meaning from one language to another because it is related to grammar structures, lexis, vocabulary knowledge, word meaning, and so on. Human language contains ambiguities at many levels of linguistic representation, but two kinds of ambiguity, lexical and structural, have received the most attention in recent psycholinguistic research (Altmann, 1990; Small Cottrell & Tanenhaus, 1988). The ambiguities of language, especially those highlighted by the process of translation, do of course carry the threat of misinterpretation and false conclusions. 7 As we know, a word normally conveys several meanings, especially lexical ambiguity which results from polysemy and homonymy, which cause the confusion for the translators. Also, words can bear various meanings in terms of polysemes and homographs. Pustejousky and Boguvaev (1996) present that lexical ambiguity creates the difficulty in considering the meaning of language. They also emphasize that words in languages usually convey more than one meaning. To put it in another way, the word with multiple meanings creates lot of difficulties for the learners. It is necessary to overcome the difficulties so that we can avoid misunderstanding as well as making mistakes in translation. Moreover, there is no one to one equivalent between form and meaning of a word. To deal with the word with several meanings, it is not an easy task because we cannot decide which meaning is appropriate; in particular, it stands in isolation. Kempson (1997), who has the same ideas with Pustejousky and Boguvaev, recognizes that the concepts of ambiguity is far from clear, and yet, as the part of the problem of interpreting forms of natural language, the explanation of ambiguity is an essential task. This idea makes clear that words with multiple meanings create a lot of difficulties. It is necessary to surmount the difficulties in order to avoid misunderstanding as well as making mistakes and to transfer exactly the meaning of the source language. The more carefully we figure out the meaning of the ambiguous words, the more clearly, exactly and deeply we understand them. By now, this study addresses some typical problems of words and some grammar structures with multiple meanings that can arise in translation. In brief, there are many kinds of lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity in English. However, the study focuses on analyzing some typical kinds. To lexical ambiguity, polysemy and homonymy will be analyzed, then three common types of structural ambiguity: attachment ambiguity, coordination ambiguity and gap-finding and filling ambiguity will be examined. Research methodology will be presented in the next section. 8 CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY To start this chapter, the research design will be recommended first, then participants and research instruments that the researcher uses to carry out the study. The procedures of the research will be presented at the end of this chapter. 3.1 Research design The design of this study is a descriptive research. Quantitative techniques such as translation test and interview were used to collect data. The researcher graded the test and interviewed the translation teachers and some last year students directly. The data collected were analyzed by SPSS software. 3.2 Research participants 3.2.1 Student participants The participants in this study were 70 seniors majoring in English Language Studies from course 32. All of them belong to two different groups at CTU, academic year 2009-2010. These participants were randomly chosen as subjects to availability. Therefore, they are fully equipped with linguistic knowledge and theory of translation. It means that they learnt and knew ambiguous sentences in English. They were chosen for doing the translation test and ten of them were chosen to answer the interview. 3.2.2 Teacher participants Besides, two translation teachers at CTU were chosen to answer the interview questions (see appendix 4, p. 33). Both of them have been teaching the subjects relating to translation for years, so they can withdraw some recommendations to help students translate ambiguous sentences better. 3.3 Research instruments 3.3.1 Translation test To know whether lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity are problematic to students and which ambiguity is more problematic, the translation test was used as the first instrument. It consisted of 20 sentences that included 10 sentences for lexical ambiguity and 10 sentences for structural ambiguity for students to translate from English into Vietnamese (see appendix 1, p. 28).These sentences were ranked in suitable spaces so that the participants could write down their translations after each sentence. The researcher selected them from many books, newspapers and the 9 Internet. Some typical textbooks are Automatic ambiguity resolution in natural language (1996), Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity (1992), Cẩm nang ngữ âm, từ vựng, cú pháp Tiếng Anh (2003) and other sources (see references, p. 38). Moreover, these sentences were neither too easy nor too difficult to translate because they were simple sentences and consisted of many grammar structures and familiar words that they have worked on many times. Most sentences focused on some typical problems that students could face with. In the test, the highest mark was 10, the lowest mark was zero, and the score for lexically ambiguous sentences and structurally ambiguous ones were equal (5 marks for lexical ambiguity and 5 marks for structural ambiguity) to withdraw which ambiguity is more problematic. Moreover, these sentences represented different kinds of lexical and structural ambiguity such as homonymy, polysemy, attachment ambiguity, gap-finding and filling ambiguity and coordination ambiguity (see appendix 3, p. 32). The time allotted was 45 minutes. The score of each correct translation was 0.25 marks. The total score of a correct sentence was 0.5 marks. The score of each incorrect translation was zero. 3.3.2 Interview Interview was another instrument that aimed at getting more problems that students had when translating and some possible solutions to help them perform their translation well. To carry out the interview, the researcher conducted two sets of interview questions for ten students and two translation teachers (see appendix 4, p. 33). The interview questions related to the research questions conducted in chapter 1 and some recommendations to translate the ambiguous sentences better. In summary, through the translation test and interview, the answers to the research questions would be clear. 3.4 Research procedure The research procedure consisted of 2 main stages. The first stage was the development of the translation test. After designing the translation test to students, the researcher piloted it by asking ten students (the same major and course with the participants) to do first to measure its internal consistency. Then this test was delivered to the participants. They were asked to do the test individually at the class and the researcher waited to collect them back. To make sure the test-takers had enough serious-mindedness, the researcher administrated the classes. They had totally 45 minutes to do the test without using dictionary. After collecting the tests, the 10 researcher began sorting the answers, valuing the internal consistency again, and working out the results. In the second stage, the researcher spent two weeks to interview some translation teachers and ten students randomly to get some recommendations that help translators transfer ambiguous sentences better (see appendix 4, p. 33). When they gave the answers, the researcher took note to save their time, and then synthesized their answers to withdraw the appropriate recommendations. 3.5 Data Analysis The data that the researcher collected were analyzed in two ways. First, they would be analyzed in forms of simple illustration and calculation. The scores of the translation test would be shown in the tables. Another way was in modern method by Excel and SPSS. The Excel was used to input the data collected, draw the figure, and reckon. The researcher used SPSS program to check the reliability of the test, the mean score of the translation test in total and the mean scores of lexical ambiguity and structural one. These instruments help the researcher have a better view of the results of work. The data will be analyzed in the next chapter. 11 Chapter 4 RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION To answer the research questions, the students' problems with ambiguity and the differences in the score between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity will be analyzed in this chapter. Then some suggested ways will be withdrawn to help students translate ambiguous sentences better. 4.1 Students' problems with ambiguity To know whether lexical ambiguity and structural one are problematic to English majors or not, the researcher used the translation test with 20 items (10 items for lexical ambiguity and 10 items for structural one). The items for lexical ambiguity were composed of polysemy and homonymy. The items for structural ambiguity included attachment ambiguity, gap-finding and filling ambiguity and coordination ambiguity. After piloting the test, the researcher measured the internal consistency, which was .78. Then the researcher delivered the test to the participants, collected all of the papers to score them, and analyze the results with the SPSS program. The consistency of the translation test in total was checked again. It was higher in comparison with the pilot time. The internal consistency .83 indicates the rather high reliability of the translation test. After valuing the internal consistency of the test, the total mean score, minimum and maximum of the translation test was checked to compare with the hypotheses in chapter 3. The results of the descriptive statistics are shown in table 4.1. Number of Minimum Maximum Mean Standard participants (N) (Min.) (Max.) (M) Deviation Total 70 1.5 7.8 4.761 1.5081 Valid N (listwise) 70 Table 4.1 Descriptive statistics of the test performance Through table 4.1, it can be seen that students may have some problems with lexical ambiguity and structural one, because the total mean score of the translation test was quite low (M= 4.76). The minimum score was 1.5 and the maximum score was 7.8. 12 Meanwhile the lowest mark was 0 and the highest mark of the test was 10. Besides, when we look at the table 1.4 (see appendix 5, p.35), we will recognize that most students did not have good results in the translation test. None got the excellent scores and only one student got the highest score (7.75). Whereas, the students got the marks from 1.5 to 3 in total are very high. 4.2 Differences in the score between lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity 4. 2.1 The test result in lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity As the researcher mentioned in the research methodology, lexical ambiguity and structural one were included in the research. In the following section, the mean scores of these ones will be presented in order to conclude which one is more problematic to students. Table 4.2 will show the descriptive statistics of the mean scores of each type. N Minimum Maximum Mean Standard Deviation Lexical 70 .50 4.00 2.3143 .81836 Structural total 70 .75 4.25 2.5464 .83220 Valid N (listwise) 70 Table 4.2: Descriptive statistics of the mean scores of the lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity 2.6 2.55 2.55 2.5 2.45 2.4 2.35 2.31 Lexical ambiguity Structural ambiguity 2.3 2.25 2.2 2.15 Figure 4.1: The mean scores of lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity 13 According to table 4.2, it can be seen that the mean score of the lexical ambiguity are lower than that of structural one. The mean score of lexical ambiguity that participants employ was 2.31, whereas that of the structural ambiguity was 2.55. These means indicate that between lexical ambiguity and structural one, lexical ambiguity is more problematic to English-major students. In addition, the minimum score of lexical ambiguity (Min= 0.5) was lower than that of structural one (Min=0.75). Similarly, the maximum score of lexical ambiguity (Max=4) was lower that that of structural ambiguity (Max=4.25). 4.2.2 An analysis of each item By now we will consider each sentence that all students did not find ease in translation. 4.2.2.1 Polysemes The data related to polyseme was examined by item 10. Item 10: Dr. Jacket gives the talk on moon. This sentence is unclear to what noun the preposition “on” refers, whether Dr. Jacket is on the moon when he gives the talk or he gives the talk which is about the moon. Since this sentence itself is far from clearness, we have to rewrite or paraphrase to make it easier to understand. The fact is that the students did not do that and did translate one of the two possible meanings of the sentence that they based on the meaning of the preposition phrase “on the moon”. 29% students could translate this sentence exactly and express what the writer wants to show as in the source text. However, there were 40% of the students who mistranslated the meaning of the preposition “on”. Here are their unacceptable translations: Tiến sĩ Jacket đã nói quá sức tưởng tượng của tôi, or Tiến sĩ Jacket có cuộc hẹn vào đêm trăng rằm, or Tiến sĩ Jacket nói chuyện viễn vong. In addition, the data collection indicates that many students recognized that this sentence should be understood in two different ways, and they did try to express these possible meanings, but they failed because the meanings they translated were not clear enough to help the readers distinguish the two different meanings of this item. It was translated as: “Tiến sĩ Jacket có buổi nói chuyện trên mặt trăng” or “Tiến sĩ Jacket nói chuyện trên mặt trăng”. Thus, being good at mother tongue is also important to translators because mother tongue or target language can help them express more accurately what they mean. The mean score of this item was 0.21. 14