Authors: Aly Sambou (Université Gaston Berger Saint-Louis, Sénégal)
Timothy Yaw Munufie (University of Legon, Ghana)
Abstract
The church of Pentecost is present in more than one hundred countries, including French-speaking countries. This therefore requires the church to translate its documents, particularly literature, announcements, Bible study manuals, lay leadership training manuals, circular letters, among other documents into French for the purpose of internal and external communication. However, the quality of some of the translations raise eyebrows as the translations are usually produced by amateurs such as pastors, church members and lay leaders who often perceive translation as a service to God or a voluntary community service. It is common belief among church members that anyone who is proficient in more than one language can be a translator; therefore, translation is usually not regarded as a profession by laypersons. Nevertheless, research in translation studies shows that translation is skill-based and goes beyond bilingualism that usually confers the translator the ability to convey messages. This paper aims to analyze the type of errors the translators make during translation from English into French, ascertain the most common type of translation errors, and find reasons for these errors. The data was collected by examining the church’s documents: conference materials, lay leadership training manuals and three announcements. Interviews were also used to determine translation problems and causes of errors. The data was analyzed by considering the frequency and percentage, and by content analysis. The results show that the most frequent errors are semantic errors (78.64%), followed by syntactic errors (11.65%) and other errors (9.70%). The errors are caused by translation procedure, carelessness, and rush deadline.
Keywords: Church Translation evaluation, fidelity assessment, translation errors, translation mistakes
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