桂诗春教授在他的A cognitive model of corpus-based analysis of Chinese Learners' errors of English一文中这样说:“Errors are traditionally distinguished from mistakes. Corder (1967) associates errors with failures in competence, and mistakes with failures in performance, making use of Chomsky's distinction. But more and more cognitive psychologists hacve found it hard to separate one from the other. ... Corpus linguistics...demonstrates language performance; language competence is only the derivation from our observation of language performance. Unless we have evidence to show that a learner keeps on making the same mistake, we have no way of determining whether it is a competence error or a performance error. So in our study, we use 'error' as a cover term for all ways of being wrong as an FL learner.你可以看他在《中国学习者英语语料库》一书中的文章也都将error译为”失误“。至于失检(mistakes)和错误(errors)的划分是后面一篇研究中国学生动词的使用错误的文章里的。这些terms的翻译国内都不统一的。要不就按照”大牛“说的,不用分那么清楚啦!