Transposition D’Une Langue À Une Autre (Roumain – Français) Comme

When teaching a foreign language, we aim for the students’ ability to properly communicate orally and in written in the given language. Assimilating the technical language, i.e. pertaining to economics, is a difficult endeavour for both the instructor (in our case, of business French) and the learner, since the numerous terms used in the everyday life have different meanings in the technical language. The technical language instructor is intent on providing the learner with new linguistic content and in sparking interest for assimilating the content. At the same time, s/he must consistently correct the mistakes from the language transfer and also prevent erroneous L2 articulations. In the following, we have focused our attention on the translation from Romanian to French – a common exercise in business French classes – namely to identify translation errors. These are errors made unconsciously during the language transfer, due to the fact that there is a plethora of similitudes between the mother tongue (Romanian) and L2 (French). The students use their own cognitive, linguistic, and extra-linguistic knowledge, but they overlook the plausibility test necessary to transferring the content into another language. Sometimes in order to speed up the translation process, students do not take into consideration the comprehension and coherence of the text in its entirety. The proposed examples for analysis pertain to Lexicology, but the study can be extended to Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, and to the discursive aspect of language. The role of the instructor is essential to maintaining the balance between the students’ keen interest for a foreign language and the instructor’s pedagogical and educational process, in spite of a certain tolerance towards the students’ slip-ups. A high level of language proficiency can be reached in terms of peculiar grammar structures, specialised terms – namely business terms – through consistent effort of error correction, through the proposal of contrastive input in the two languages, and through the analysis of the usage of certain terms.