engleski

Funny Errors in the Interlanguage of Law Students

Students’ interlanguage is characterized by specific linguistic features on lexical, grammatical and syntactic level. Errors are one of its common characteristics, too, depending on the specific level of knowledge of foreign language the individual student has mastered. In this paper analyze students’ errors in legal language on phonological, morpho-syntactic, semantic and grammatical level, based on one hundred written exams by the second year students of the Faculty of Law, University in Osijek (Croatia). The research deals primarily with students’ translations of a given text into Croatian and analyzes different types of errors arising from the poor knowledge of the foreign language and/or from false understanding of legal terms and phrases. Special emphasis was put on errors comprising the elements of humor. In the introductory part of the paper the authors offer a typology and classification of errors in students’ languages. Main part of the paper is focused on the analysis of errors found in the corpus of students’ translations, especially those with the elements of humor. In the conclusion the errors are classified according to the typology offered in the first part of the paper and some deductions are drawn concerning the most common errors that might be typical for learning foreign languages for legal purposes at the tertiary education level.

Foreign language teaching ; students’ interlanguage ; errors ; error analysis ; translation ; legal terms

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