TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TRONG CÁCH DỊCH các từ có yếu tổ văn hóa TRONG CUỐN SÁCH “WANDERING THROUGH VIETNAMESE CULTURE” của hữu NGỌC)

College of Foreign Languages VHUNPostgraduate Studies  BẠCH ÁNH HỒNG EQUIVALENCE IN THE TRANSLATION OF VIETNAMESE CULTURAL WORDS IN THE BOOK “WANDERING THROUGH VIETNAMESE CULTURE” B

College of Foreign Languages (VHUN)

Postgraduate Studies



BẠCH ÁNH HỒNG

EQUIVALENCE IN THE TRANSLATION OF

VIETNAMESE CULTURAL WORDS IN THE BOOK

“WANDERING THROUGH VIETNAMESE CULTURE”

BY HUU NGOC

(TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TRONG CÁCH DỊCH CÁC TỪ CÓ YẾU TỔ VĂN HÓA TRONG CUỐN SÁCH “WANDERING THROUGH

VIETNAMESE CULTURE” CỦA HỮU NGỌC)

Field: English Linguistics Code: 602215

Course: K13

M.A Minor Thesis Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Lê Hùng Tiến

Hanoi, July 2007

This paper is a linguistic study on equivalences and the translation methods rendered to achieve the equivalent effects in a book written by the writer and translator, Huu Ngoc More specifically, the chosen subject of investigation is the translation of Vietnamese cultural words in the book “Wandering through Vietnamese culture” The reasons for this choice are both linguistic and practical

Linguistically, the translation of culture-related words has never been seen as an easy task, especially between such two distant cultures as Vietnam and English The challenges may originate from cultural differences, the cultural knowledge of the translator etc However, the hardest problems may be attached to non- equivalence which consists of the concepts unknown to target language readers, the non-lexicalization of the concepts, the lack of super ordinates of hyponyms etc The main contribution of this paper is to draw out the main ways of dealing with the hurdles by investigating how an experienced translator and a famous Vietnamese cultural expert overcome the difficulty in his book

Practically, I hope that the lessons drawn from the study of his work could effectively assist me in my practical job at my university, where a Vietnamese Studies Department is

to be opened with an aim to train new generation of youngsters who will narrow down the culture gaps between Vietnam and other countries

On the completion of this thesis, I am indebted to many people

First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisor, Assoc

Prof Dr Le Hung Tien for his valuable and prompt advice and helps, without which, this

thesis could not come into being

My thanks also go to all my lecturers and officers from Post Graduate Department, College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, who have facilitated me with the best possible conditions during my whole course of studying

Last but not least, let my gratitude go to my family and friends, whose encouragement and assistance are of extreme importance during the course of my writing this thesis

Hanoi, July 2007

Bach Anh Hong

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

PART A: INTRODUCTION 5

1 Rationale 5

2 Scope of the study 5

3 Aims of the study 6

4 Methodology 6

5 Design of the study 7

Chapter 1: Theoretical background 8

1.1 Translation theory 8

1.1.1 Definition of translation 8

1.1.2 Translation equivalence 8

1.1.2.1 The nature of equivalence in translation 9

1.1.2.2 Types of equivalence in translation 9

1.1.3 Common problems of non-equivalence 11

1.2 Notion of culture in translation 13

1.3 Cultural categories 14

1.4 Translation methods 15

1.5 Conclusion 17

Chapter 2: Vietnamese cultural words and their equivalences 18

2.1 The most common types of cultural words 18

2.2 The most common types of equivalence 18

2.2.1 Nil equivalence: 20

2.2.2 Other types of equivalence 28

2.2.2.1 One-to-part-of one equivalence 28

2.2.2.3 One-to-one equivalence 34

PART C: CONCLUSION 36

REFERENCES 41

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Translating from one language into another has never been an easy job even for the most experienced translators Translation, involving the transposition of thoughts expressed in one language by one social group into the appropriate expression of another group, entails

a process of cultural de-coding, re-coding and en-coding However, the process of transmitting cultural elements is a complicated and vital task Culture is a complex collection of experiences which condition daily life; it includes history, social structure, religion, traditional customs and everyday usage This is difficult to comprehend completely The more disparities that exist between any two languages, the greater the meaning loss in the translation is As hard as it may seem, the translation of Vietnamese cultural words is now an inevitable part in our integrating life since we have become a member of WTO Thang Long University is one of those where the Department of Vietnam Study is going to be opened with an aims of training Vietnamese students into those who can introduce Vietnamese culture to the world This sooner or later will pose teachers of English at Thang Long University a problem of matching cultural equivalence between English and Vietnamese However, not many empirical studies have been conducted so far on the issue of translation of Vietnamese cultural words into English Those reasons may explain how this study came into being The study investigates how a very famous and experienced translator, Huu Ngoc, dealt with all the Vietnamese cultural words his whole-hearted work “Wandering through Vietnamese culture” It also raised the need for translators of Vietnamese-English texts, especially in treating cultural terms, to pay close attention to the linguistic and cultural elements of the source texts

2 Scope of the study

This study sets its boundary in studying cultural words in the book “Wandering through Vietnamese culture” by Huu Ngoc It will look into the equivalence and non-equivalence

of Vietnamese cultural words and their translations from the following points:

• the most common types of equivalence

• the possible reasons for the non-equivalence

• their translations

3 Aims of the study

The main aims of the study are:

• To find out the most common type of equivalence used in his translation of Vietnamese cultural words

• To draw out the common problems of equivalence seen in the translation of Vietnamese cultural words into English

• To draw out the strategies and procedures that may apply to the translation of Vietnamese cultural words

• To suggest some implications for the translation of the cultural words

On this ground, the study seeks answer for the retailing research questions:

• What are the common types of equivalence used in the translation of cultural words in the book “Wandering through Vietnamese culture” by Huu Ngoc?

• What are the most common problems in translating Vietnamese cultural words into English that can be seen in the book?

• What are the common methods used in the translation of Vietnamese cultural words?

4 Methodology

With the hope to go on the right track for the answers, the writer will conduct the study in following steps:

• Building up a theoretical background for the paper

• Collecting and group the Vietnamese cultural words and their English equivalents for description, analysis, comparison and induction

• Finding out the similarities and differences and draw out the translation used in the translation of cultural words

• The main method is contrastive analysis

• Data collection: The Vietnamese cultural words and their translations appear in the book “Wandering through Vietnamese culture” by Huu Ngoc.

5 Design of the study

This study consists of three main parts, a reference, and a number of appendixes

Part A: Introduction

The introduction gives rationale for the study It also outlines the aims and the methods of the study

Part B: Development

The development comprises two chapters

Chapter 1, which is named “Theoretical background”, provides the theory of

translation and the translation of cultural words

Chapter 2 entitled “Cultural words and their equivalences” discusses the most

common types of equivalence in translation of Vietnamese cultural words

It also studies the translation of Vietnamese cultural words and translation methods employed in their translation by Huu Ngoc in his book

“Wandering though Vietnamese culture”

Part C, which is the “Conclusion”, summaries the strategies and procedures and

comments

Reference includes all the books, articles or website that has been referred to during the

writing of this thesis

The appendixes list examples of different groups of equivalence in order of the alphabet

“change of form”, by emphasizing the “intended in the text” as said “ Translation is rendering a written text into another language in the way the author intended in the text.”Hatim & Mason (1990:3), on the other hand, focused more on the communicative purpose

of translation by citing: “Translation is a communicative process which takes place within

a social context” It is then followed by other linguists, Bell (1991: 5), who thought

“semantic and stylistic equivalences” are crucial for a translation to communicate successfully: “Translation is the expression in another language (or TL) of what has been expressed in another, source language, preserving semantic and stylistic equivalences”These definitions, in spite of slight differences in the expressions, share common features that they all emphasize the importance of finding the closest equivalence in meaning by the choice of appropriate target language’s lexical and grammatical structures, communication situation, and cultural and the requirement to find equivalents which have similar characteristics to the original It is this notion of equivalence, which will be taken into consideration in the next part

1.1.2 Translation equivalence

As easily seen, equivalence can be considered a central concept in translation theory Therefore, it is not by chance that many theorists define translation in terms of equivalence relation Newmark (1988) defines: “The overriding purpose of any translation should be to achieve ‘equivalence effect’ i.e to produce the same effect on the readership of translation

as was obtained on the readership of the original” He also sees equivalence effect as the

desirable result rather than the aim of any translation except for two cases: (a) If the purpose of the SL text is to affect and the TL translation is to inform or vice versa; (b) If there is a pronounced cultural gap between the SL and the TL text.

Pym(1992) has even pointed to its circularity: equivalence is supposed to define translation, in turn, defines equivalence

1.1.2.1 The nature of equivalence in translation

Equivalence has been considered the unique intertextual relation that only translations are expected to show: it is defined as the relationship between a source text and a target text that allows the TT to be considered as a translation of the ST in the first place Nearly all traditional definitions of translation, whether formal or informal, appeal to some notion of this: translation means the replacement, or substitution, of an utterance in one language by

a formally or semantically or pragmatically equivalent utterance in another language

Therefore, it is no surprise that equivalence is always taken for granted as a prescriptive criterion, as Koller (1995:196) says:

“Translation can be understood as the result of a text-reprocessing activity, by means of which a source-language text is transposed into a target-language text Between the resulting text in L2 (the target-language text) and the source text in L1 (the source-language text) there exists a relationship which can be designated as a translational, or equivalence relation.”

Then the question to be asked is not whether the two texts are equivalent, but what type and degree of translation equivalence they reveal Therefore, it is possible to say that equivalence is “Any relation characterizing translation under a specified set of circumstances.” And “Equivalence was a relationship between two texts in two languages, rather than between the languages themselves” (Dr Tien’s lectures- 2007)

1.1.2.2 Types of equivalence in translation

Translation theorists tend to classify equivalence in accordance with different criteria and approach Some out standings are quantitative, meaning based, form-based and function based

a Quantitative approach:

Munday (2001) seems to stick to numeracy and suggests:

• One-to-one equivalence: A single expression in TL is equivalent to a single expression in SL

• One-to-many equivalence: More than one TL expressions are equivalent to a single SL expression

• Many- to-one equivalence: there is more than one expression in the source language but there is a single expression in target language which is equivalence to them

• One-to-part-of-one equivalence: A TL expression covers part of a concept designated by a single SL expression

• Nil equivalence: no TL expression is equivalent to a single SL expression -> loaned/borrowed equivalents should be used

b Meaning-based equivalence

Koller (1979) considers five types of equivalence:

• Denotative equivalence: the SL and the TL words refer to the same thing in the real world

• Connotative equivalence: this type of equivalence provides additional values besides denotative value and is achieved by the translator’s choice of synonymous words or expressions

• Text-normative equivalence: The SL and the TL words are used in the same or similar context in their respective languages

• Pragmatic equivalence: With readership orientation, the SL and TL words have the same effect on their respective readers

• Formal equivalence: This type of equivalence produces an analogy of form in the translation by their exploiting formal possibilities of TL, or creating new forms in TL

c Form-based equivalence:

An extremely interesting discussion of the notion of equivalence can be found in Baker (1992) who seems to offer a more detailed list of conditions upon which the concept of equivalence can be defined She distinguishes between:

• Equivalence that can appear at word level and above word level, when translating from one language into another This means that the translator should pay attention to a number of factors when considering a single word, such as number, gender and tense (1992:11-12)

• Textual equivalence, when referring to the equivalence between a SL text and a

TL text in terms of information and cohesion It is up to the translator to decide whether or not to maintain the cohesive ties as well as the coherence of the SL text His or her decision will be guided by three main factors, that is, the target audience, the purpose of the translation and the text type

1.1.3 Common problems of non-equivalence

As we all share the view that equivalence is the vital part of translation, we may easily agree that the problem of non-equivalence is the hardest hurdles of translation Many theorists has showed their concerns in the issue of “untranslatability” The following are some common types of non-equivalence at word level suggested by Barker (1994: 72):

a Culture-specific concepts

The source-language word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target culture The concept in question may be abstract or concrete; it may relate to a religious belief, a social custom, or even a type of food.

b The source-language concept is not lexicalized in the target language

The source-language word may express a concept which is known in the target culture but simply not lexicalized, that is not ‘allocated’ a target-language word to express it

c The source-language word is semantically complex

The source-language word may be semantically complex This is a fairly common problem

in translation Words do not have to be morphologically complex to be semantically complex (Bolinger and Sears, 1968) In other words, a single word which consists of a single morpheme can sometimes express a more complex set of meanings than a whole sentence

d The source and target languages make different distinctions in meaning

The target language may make more or fewer distinctions in meaning than the source language What one language regards as an important distinction in meaning another language may not perceive as relevant

e The target language lacks a superordinate

The target language may have specific words (hyponyms) but no general word (superordinate) to head the semantic field Russian has no ready equivalent for facilities, meaning ‘any equipment, building, services, etc that are provided for a particular activity

or purpose’

f The target language lacks a specific term (hyponym)

More commonly, languages tend to have general words (superordinates) but lack specific ones (hyponyms), since each language makes only those distinctions in meaning which seem relevant to its particular environment

g Differences in physical or interpersonal perspective

Physical perspective may be of more importance in one language than it is in another Perspective may also include the relationship between participants in the discourse (tenor)

h Differences in expressive meaning

There may be a target-language word which has the same propositional meaning as the source-language word, but it may have a different expressive meaning

i Differences in form

There is often no equivalent in the target language for a particular form in the source text Certain suffixes and prefixes which convey propositional and other types of meaning in English often have no direct equivalents in other languages

j Differences in frequency and purpose using specific forms

Even when a particular form does have a ready equivalent in the target language, there may

be a difference in the frequency with which it is used or the purpose for which it is used

k The use of loan words in the source text

The use of loan words in the source text poses a special problem in translation Quite apart

form their respective propositional meaning, loan words such as au fait, chic, and alfresco

in English are often used for their prestige value, because they can add an air of sophistication to the text or its subject matter

1.2 Notion of culture in translation

The definition of "culture" as given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1999) varies from descriptions of the "Arts" to plant and bacteria cultivation and includes a wide range of intermediary aspects More specifically concerned with language and translation, Newmark (1988:94) defines culture as "the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression", thus acknowledging that each language group has its own culturally specific features He further clearly states that operationally he does "not regard language as a component or feature of culture" (Newmark 1988:95) in direct opposition to the view taken by Vermeer who states that "language is part of a culture" (1989:222) According to Newmark, Vermeer's stance would imply the impossibility to translate whereas for the latter, translating the source language (SL) into a suitable form of TL is part of the translator's role in transcultural communication

Despite the differences in opinion as to whether language is part of culture or not, the two notions appear to be inseparable Discussing the problems of correspondence in translation, Nida (1964:130) confers equal importance to both linguistic and cultural differences between the SL and the TL and concludes that "differences between cultures may cause more severe complications for the translator than do differences in language structure" It

is further explained that parallels in culture often provide a common understanding despite significant formal shifts in the translation The cultural implications for translation are thus

of significant importance as well as lexical concerns

Lotman (1978:211-32) states that "no language can exist unless it is steeped in the context

of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its centre, the structure of natural language" Bassnett (1980:13-14) underlines the importance of this double consideration when translating by stating that language is "the heart within the body of culture," the survival of both aspects being interdependent Linguistic notions of transferring meaning are seen as being only part of the translation process; "a whole set of extra-linguistic criteria" must also be considered As Bassnett further points out, "the translator must tackle the SL text in such a way that the TL version will correspond to the

SL version To attempt to impose the value system of the SL culture onto the TL culture

is dangerous ground" (Bassnett, 1980:23) Thus, when translating, it is important to consider not only the lexical impact on the TL reader, but also the manner in which cultural aspects may be perceived and make translating decisions accordingly

1.3 Cultural categories

Adapting Nida, Newmark (1988:95-102) places "foreign cultural words" in several categories as follows:

(1) Ecology

Animals, plants, local winds, mountains, plains, ice, etc

(2) Material culture (artifacts)

Food, clothes, housing, transport and communications

(3) Social culture – work and leisure

(4) Organizations, customs, ideas – Political, social, legal, religious, artistic

(5) Gestures and habits (often described in ‘non-verbal’ language)

1.4 Translation methods

Language and culture may thus be seen as being closely related and both aspects must be considered for translation When considering the translation of cultural words and notions, Newmark proposes two opposing methods: transference and componential analysis (Newmark, 1988:96) As Newmark mentions, transference gives "local colour," keeping cultural names and concepts Although placing the emphasis on culture, meaningful to initiated readers, he claims this method may cause problems for the general readership and limit the comprehension of certain aspects The importance of the translation process in communication leads Newmark to propose componential analysis which he describes as being "the most accurate translation procedure, which excludes the culture and highlights the message" (Newmark, 1988:96) This may be compared to the scale proposed by Hervey et al, visualised as follows:

(Hervey et al, 1992:28)

Nida's definitions (1964:129) of formal and dynamic equivalence may also be seen to apply when considering cultural implications for translation According to Nida, a "gloss translation" mostly typifies formal equivalence where form and content are reproduced as faithfully as possible and the TL reader is able to "understand as much as he can of the customs, manner of thought, and means of expression" of the SL context Contrasting with this idea, dynamic equivalence "tries to relate the receptor to modes of behaviour relevant within the context of his own culture" without insisting that he "understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context" All in all, it can be easily seen that the above approaches are not very much different from what Venuti (1995:20) named “source language oriented and target language-oriented” translation approach, which may share some similarities with Newmark’s ( 1988: 145) methods of translation as follows:

Semantic translation Communicative translation

Word-for-word translation

This method focuses on SL word order in which words are translated by most common meaning and out of context Therefore, the results of this method are that the translation is read like original text

Adaptation

This is the ‘freest’ form of translation It is used mainly for plays (comedies) and poetry; the themes, characters, plots are usually preserved, the SL culture converted to the TL culture and the text rewritten The deplorable practice of having a play or poem literally translated and then rewritten by an established dramatist or poet has produced many poor adaptations have ‘rescued’ period plays

Free translation

Free translation reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without the form

of the original Usually it is a paraphrase much longer than the original, a so-called

‘intralingual translation’, often prolix and pretentious, and not translation at all

Idiomatic translation

Idiomatic translation reproduces the ‘message’ of the original but tends to distort nuances

of meaning by preferring colloquialisms and idioms where these do not exist in the original (Authorities as diverse as Seleskovitch and Stuart Gilbert tend to this form of likely, ‘natural’ translation.)

1.5 Conclusion

This part of study has just examined general translation theories It also takes a close look

on the significance of culture and the translation of cultural words Furthermore, a variety

of different approaches have been examined in an attempt to shed light on Huu Ngoc translation of cultural words in the next chapter

Chapter 2: Vietnamese cultural words and their equivalences

2.1 The most common types of cultural words

In his classification of culture words, Newmark (1998) concluded five major categories of culture words including ecology, material culture (artifacts), social culture – work and leisure, organisations, customs, ideas and gestures and habits

In Huu Ngoc’s book, the frequency of material culture, and to be more specific, food is the highest as compared to other types The ratio among them can be illustrated in the chart as follows:

Culture-related words Quantity Rate (%)

Food and drinks 135 45.9%

2.2 The most common types of equivalence

As mentioned above, there are many approaches to the classification of equivalence in translation This thesis adopts Munday (2001)’s perspective of quantitative equivalence which is consisted of one-to-one equivalence, many- to- one equivalence, one-to-part-of-

one equivalence and nil equivalence We can hardly find the case of one-to- many equivalence Therefore, this kind of equivalence is not taken into consideration.

The writer of the thesis has listed almost all the cultural words occurred in his book and put them into the order of the most common types of equivalence to the least common one The data can be easily find in the table below:

Type of equivalence Quantity Rate (%) Examples

Nil 194 66 Nước vối: “voi tea”

2.2.1 Nil equivalence:

Looking into the translation of “Wandering through Vietnamese culture”, one can easily see on the chart above that nil-equivalence makes up the largest part, consisting 66% Clearly, This is not a surprise to any translator who have ever stepped into the translation land of culture related words There are some explanations for this biggest share

The possible explanation is the availability Normally, with exactly the same meaning, no one can say for sure that two cultures could choose to express it the same way For

example, , Vietnamese people would prefer using the buffalo in many idioms “Ngưu tầm

ngưu, mã tầm mã” but the English would like to use “bird” as in “Birds of the same feather flocks together” One other example may be “hiền như củ khoai”, “hiền như bụt”

or “hiền như cục đất” for Vietnamese people but their English counter part would like to say “as mild as a lamb” (hiền như một chú cừu non) That is the case when two cultures

express the same meaning As a consequence, one can easily guess what the situation will

be like when there are abundant of things in Source Language (SL) culture but there is no such things Target Language (TL) culture

The first problem occurs when the Vietnamese word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target language culture To be more exact, those words often link to food and many kinds of tropical herbs and plants For instances:

The explanation to this situation may be the climate differences Vietnamese climate is hot and humid which is home to many tropical kinds of plants while the English climate is cold and dry, which may be suitable to totally different kinds of plants Therefore, it can be easily understood while there are a lot of tropical plant culture-related words in his book which may not be known to English readers

This may also be the reason for the second group of non-equivalence which is dishes Different kinds of vegetables / herbs may lead to different ways of cooking, which leads to the existence of exotic Vietnamese dishes to Englishman For examples:

Xôi gấc Thịt kho tàu Cua đồng nấu thiên lý

Living on land, Vietnamese (and Chinese) peasants also have their own festivals, customs

or ceremonies relating to land, rice or grains, trees with special attention paid to the weather, especially rain For instances:

Lễ cầu đảo (cầu mưa) Lập Xuân Tết Đoan Ngọ (diệt sâu bọ) Tết Hàn Thực Cốc Vũ Dựng cây nêu ngày tết Tết Trung Thu Tết Ông Công Ông Táo Đi hái lộc

Additionally, the traditional games and entertainments of the Vietnamese are also various:

Trồng Nụ, Trồng Hoa Ô ăn quan Đánh thẻ

Those mentioned categories are like only the tip of the Vietnamese culture iceberg which can be roughly listed as illustrations for the diversity of the source language culture Clearly, this poses a huge challenge to the translator and the writer

So that will happen if the translator has to face with the translation of culture-related concepts? Looking into the translation of those nil-equivalents words, one can clearly see that the first common translation tool that is fully made use of is borrowings

First of all, looking at the group of typically tropical plants and vegetables, Huu Ngoc uses the third language, that is, Latin as a medium for translation He tends to use the scientific terms of the plants to translate the Vietnamese words For instances:

Cây sấu : dracontomelum duppereanum Pierre

Gạo tẻ : Oryza sativa Lin var dura