LEXICAL ERRORS - A CHALLENGE FOR SERBIAN STUDENTS

The aim of this paper is to analyze lexical errors occurring in the translation exams in the second and third year of the French Language and Literature studies. The corpus of the research consists of translations of Serbian literary texts into French. This paper is a continuation of the research in grammar errors in the same research corpus that was previously performed. According to Hamel and Milicevic (2007), lexical errors affect each of the three components of the linguistic sign - signifier, signified, and form. Therefore, there is the difference between errors of form (spelling errors), errors in meaning, and errors in co-occurrence (colocations and syntactic combinations). Starting from the typology of lexical errors proposed by the mentioned authors, our analysis consists of the following stages: identification, correction, description, and interpretation of the causing factors. The results of this research are shown in decreasing frequency of errors. Our goal is to explore the lexical errors in order to propose solutions for their reduction.