The sequence of tenses (SOT) is a phenomenon which exists in English and some other languages, but not Serbian. Therefore, translating texts which contain SOT into Serbian frequently creates problems, and in the English Department of Belgrade Faculty of Philology special attention is paid to teaching students to master that set of rules. This study was carried out with third-year students, by using the contrastive analysis method, which consisted of comparing the source and target texts, in order to draw conclusions as to why errors are occasionally made. First of all, when a novel written in English and its translation into Serbian were compared, it was noticed that many sentences in which SOT was used were wrongly translated because the same rules were applied to the target text. In some cases, failure to adapt the tenses even led to misunderstanding of the entire sentence, mostly because past tense was used instead of the present. The sentences that were pinpointed as the most problematic were given to students to translate, and then their translations were contrasted with the original. It was concluded that detailed and comprehensive teaching of SOT within grammar classes proved worth the effort, since the students made far fewer mistakes than was the case with the published translation, so the sense of the text was much clearer. Those few errors that the respondents made were then analysed in order to discover deeper causes for their occurrence and suggest guidelines for future work with students.

Authors:
Biljana Djoric Francuski, University of Belgrade, Serbia

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Biljana Djoric Francuski is a University Postdoctoral Fellow or Instructor at University of Belgrade in Serbia

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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