Turkish French Learners and Relative Clauses: Reflections from a Written Translation Test

Dık and –an are turkish equivalents of french relative pronouns (rps). while -an suffix generally constructs subject relative clauses, -dık suffix is very rich regarding rp equivalents in french. to examine translation problems with rps in their texts, students in first, second, third and fourth years (n = 81) from french language teaching department at çukurova university were given a test with 20 turkish sentences with rps to be translated into french. results suggest that students match the -dık suffix most successfully with the que relative, then with the où relative. dont is the least successfully matched relative with -dık suffix. the study also showed two important findings about tense used: 1) if judgment in matrix sentence is considered as permanent, present tense is the privileged in constituent sentence, 2) intrinsic semantic features of verbs may also affect tense in constituent sentence independently of the tense used in matrix sentence.