RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, vol.0, no.22, pp.934-947, 2021 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Turkish is an agglutinative language in which agglutinations determine the meaning of sentences. For this reason, grammatical case suffixes play a significant role in constructing semantically proper sentences. In this regard, learners of Turkish as a foreign language are supposed to dwell on meanings of case markers rather than structures because case marking suffixes have lots of functions which cause the students to have problems regarding the proper use of suffixes. Studies indicate that proper use of case markers is one of the most problematic issues that learners of Turkish as a foreign language face. Therefore, learners of Turkish should be aware of the semantic richness of this language arising from case marking suffixes. The purpose of this study is to determine the errors in translations of ablative case markers of international students at Turkish Language Learning Research and Application Centre in a state university. As data collection tools, a background questionnaire and a translation task were used. In the background questionnaire, some personal information regarding students' native language, language choice in the translation task, and duration of learning Turkish was obtained. In the translation task, students were expected to translate the given sentences into one of the three languages: English, French or German, whichever they are good at, by taking ablative case markers into consideration. The study's findings revealed that students have considerable problems in figuring out the less frequently used functions of ablative case markers while translating the sentences from Turkish into the language that they chose.