An Error Analysis on the Use of Past Tense in Narrative Text Translation of SMA Students

Abstract

This article describes the errors that students committed on the use of past tense in narrative text translation. The purpose is to reveal the common errors in using past tense in narrative translation made by the eleventh grade students at one of state senior high school in Surakarta. In this research, the researcher used descriptive method. The study focused on the difficulty in using past tense in narrative text translation. The techniques of collecting the data used in this research are using test and questionnaire. The qualitative data were analyzed by identifying the data of errors, describing the errors and classifying into the types of errors, explaining the errors based on the error sources, and evaluating the errors. Based on the result of the research, the total error is 465 errors. First, the errors based on the indicators are: error on the use of V2, error of time marker, error of modal auxiliaries, and error of helping verb. The highest frequency of error is error on the use of V2 (390/ 83.87%). Then the lowest frequency of error is error of time marker (1/ 0.22%). Second, the errors based on the causes of errors are omission (absence of an item that must appear in a well-formed utterance), addition (characterized the presence of an item, which must not appear in a well-formed utterance), and overgeneralization (the learner creates a deviant structure on the basis of other structures).The highest frequency of error is omission (104/ 56.52%), and the lowest frequency of error is addition (36/ 19.57%).