Teaching semantic considerations of ablative and locative cases in Turkish-to-English translated texts

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Franzy

Translation aims to convey the source text’s original tone with syntactic and semantic accuracy while preserving intended meaning, yet case systems can create difficulties when source and target languages differ typologically. This study analyzes erroneous samples in Turkish-to-English translation of ablative and locative cases. Data come from 131 translation students across 360 pages of translation activities. A three-category taxonomy classifies inaccurate, redundant, and missing cases. Results show similar error counts for both case types, with inaccurate cases dominating.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages22

Reading Time55 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Language acquisition background and cognitive demands

Translation as a multidimensional process

Grammar equivalence and the importance of cases

Case morphology challenges and preposition use

Focus on ablative and locative cases and study aim

Australian Journal ofApplied Linguistics, 3(3), 233–254 (2020) [https://doi.org/10.29140/ajal.v3n3.365](https://doi.org/10.29140/ajal.v3n3.365) Teaching semantic considerations of ablative and locative cases in Turkish-to-English translated texts CÜNEYT DEMIR a a The University ofSiirt, Turkey [ardgelen@hotmail.com](ardgelen@hotmail.com) Abstract Translation aims to transmit the original tone of the source text both syntactically and semantically accurate without losing the intent of a message. However, some syntactic considerations such as cases may pose a problem particularly if the source and target texts belong to different language typologies. Accordingly, this study investigated the translation of ablative and locative cases in Turkish-to-English studies to find out and analyse erroneous samples. The population of the study is composed of 131 students at the department of translation and the 360 pages data were gathered through different translation activities. Taxonomy with three categorizations was constructed for the identification and classification of the data, which are inaccurate cases, redundant cases, and case-missing. Results showed that ablative and locative cases had a similar number of errors in translation from Turkish to English, and inaccurate cases made up of the large proportion of these errors. This study concluded that there are a few considerations regarding ablative and locative cases that need to be taken into account while rendering a text. At last, some pedagogical implications aiming at lowering students’ errors of translation relating to ablative and locative cases were suggested. Keywords: cases, ablative, locative, translation, writing Introduction Language acquisition (LA) has been robustly studied from the aspect of morphological variability (cf. Radfors, 1991), incoming input (Universal Grammar), and extralinguistic views (motivation, attitudes, and so on). The process of LA, regardless of researchers’views, necessitates intensive cognitive efforts either consciously (Robinson, Mackey, Gass, & Schmidt, 2012) or unconsciously (Selinger, 1983; University of Cambridge, 2011), and these cognitive efforts need to be escalated even further in learning a second language (Wen, Mota, & McNeill, 2015) because the brain needs to pay much more attention to cognitive processes in SLA (Tomlin & Villa, 1994) . Furthermore, the difficulty that speakers faced during second language acquisition (SLA) processes continue even after the speaker has acquired the language, particularly if the second language belongs to a different language family from their first language because the speaker needs to carry out comprehensive cognitive calculations in order to start cross-language activation (Kroll, Dussias, Bice, & Perrotti, 2015) and accordingly code and decode expressions in the second language. This is the situation for translators who need to be updated in both source language (SL) and target language (TL) because it is a profession requiring to eliminate syntactic (Shreve, Lacruz, & Angelone, 2010), semantic or any contextual disruptions in a translation task. Translation aims to transmit the original tone of the source text grammatically and without losing the intent of a message; therefore, both syntactic and semantic considerations need to be taken into consideration in translation studies. However, rendering texts is not a one-way process requiring only target language competence, but a multi-dimensional process including many agents such as culture, motivation, and context. In concise, not to yield a poor performance, all of these considerations-from metacognitive problem solving (Angelone, 2010) to other norms of translation (cf. Schaffner, 2010) -should be taken into account on the process of translation. A good translation is successful in conveying the message both syntactically and semantically (Jiménez et al., 2015); that is, it is to be constructed through accurate grammar a

FAQs

What is the main focus of the study?

The study investigates how ablative and locative cases are translated from Turkish into English, and it analyzes erroneous samples related to these case types.

How is the translation data collected and who participates?

The population includes 131 students in the translation department, and data are gathered through different translation activities totaling 360 pages.

What categories are used to classify translation errors?

Errors are categorized into three types: inaccurate cases, redundant cases, and case-missing.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Franzy