Mohammad Javad Pourabed

The error analysis approach is one of the most important and latest educational approaches to language teaching, especially foreign language teaching. In light of this approach, the teacher counts, interprets, and classifies students’ errors in order to find solutions to these errors. Theorists of this approach believe that students' errors are only a stage of learning. In this area, we find that translating prepositions into other languages, including Persian, creates major problems for students, as they face many problems in choosing an appropriate equivalent for prepositions during translation. This research paper, in accordance with the descriptive-analytical approach and relying on the field method, attempts to identify the errors of undergraduate students at the Iranian University of Semnan in translating prepositions from Arabic to Persian first, then classify them, find out the reasons for these errors, and finally propose solutions to these errors. The sample of this research includes 30 second-semester students in the Arabic language branch at Semnan University. The focus was on their translations of the book “The Unknown Journey of Sinbad” written by Magdy Saber. The results of the research indicate that linguistic overlap is the most important factor in students’ errors, and among the prepositions, we found that the letters (من) and (في) are among the prepositions that most mislead the student into making serious mistakes during translation.