Abstract:

This research analyzed the types of grammatical errors in English public sign translations in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia and the factors causing the errors. It used five public signs and their English translations as the data source. The theory proposed by Van Valin (1992) was used to identify the first formulated research problem. Meanwhile, the theory proposed by Vinay & Darbelnet (2000) was used to analyze the second formulated problem. The results showed that the public signs translations had grammatical errors in noun phrase formation, the use of the auxiliary verbs, verbal phrase formation, spellings, the formation of prepositional phrase and the application of tenses. Additionally, the inappropriate applications of the translation procedure, lack of understanding of the Target Language’s (TL) grammar and the strong tendency for the translator to prioritize the Source Language’s (SL) syntactical grammar were the factors causing the errors. These findings lead to a conclusion that the occurrence of any type of error in the translations could be due to the dominant interference from one of the languages towards the other language. Take for instance, the interference of the SL towards the TL. Therefore, understanding the linguistic and cultural aspects of both the SL and TL is compulsory to ensure that the translations are satisfactory.

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