The Major and Minor Errors in the Translations of Thesis Abstracts

A thesis abstract is an essential part of a thesis since it represents the content of the thesis. In Indonesia, where the abstracts need to be translated into English, a number of translation errors may occur. This study aims at analysing the translation errors in the thesis abstracts and classify the errors into major and minor errors. The data were collected from the undergraduate theses of the Communication Science Department students, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Airlangga. The results show a total of 128 errors, where 79 of them (61.7%) are major errors. In the major error types, the most frequent error type is the Experientially Inaccurate translation (21.1%), followed by the Logically Inaccurate translation (11.7%), and the Interpersonally Inadequate translation (11.7%). Meanwhile, the minor errors only comprise 38.3% (49 errors) of the total errors. The errors include the Minor Grammatical errors (36.7%) and Spelling errors (1.6%). Considering these numbers of errors, it is necessary to pay more attention to the translation of the thesis abstracts because they reflect the content of the theses.