“A Descriptive Study on Past Verb Used in Students‟ Translation of Folklore Si Pahit Lidah” (A Case Study of the Sixth Semester Students of English Students at University of Bengkulu)

This research applies descriptive method. The objective of this research is to
investigate which tense the error is mostly when translating narrative text entitled Si Pahit
Lidah at Sixth Semester Students of English Students at University of Bengkulu. In this
research, past simple tense, past continuous tense, past perfect tense, and past perfect
continuous were included into the text that the students had to translate. The population
consisted of English Education Study Programme students in sixth semester. The totals of
population were 78 students and the samples were 50% in each class or 40 students. The data
in this study were taken by using translation test and questionnaire as the secondary data. The
result of this study showed that generally the students had known to use past tense especially
in using past simple tense with percentage 67%, past perfect tense 17%, past continuous tense
with percentage 16%, from 826past sentences that had translated by 40 students.
Key words : Folklore, Past Tense, Students‟ Translation