Common Mistakes in Translating English Sentences Containing Impersonal 'It' into Indonesian

Abstract

Structural differences between English and Indonesian structure usually cause problems for the students to translate. One of the problems is translating English sentences containing ‘impersonal It’ from English into Indonesian. Many students make mistakes in translating ‘impersonal It’. The objectives of this research is: first, to examine types of errors in translating sentences containing ‘impersonal It’ from English to Indonesian. Second, to determine the most common type of translation errors. This paper applies descriptive qualitative method. Besides, the writer uses library research to find any information relating to the topic of this paper, such as books, journals, and websites. The samples are the fifth semester English major students of Pertiwi School of Foreign Languages, academic year of 2019-2020. The data is taken from the translation of English sentences containing ‘impersonal It’ into Indonesian done by the students in their quiz. In analysing the data the writer applies content analysis and a classification of errors proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982 in Rusmiati, 2019) called Surface Strategy Taxonomy. There are four types of errors, namely addition, omission, misformation, and misordering.The result of this research shows that there is no omission error, addition error is 23,76%, misformation errors is 5,50%, and misordering error is 35,07%.. The highest errors that the students make is misformation errors.