My internship report at a software technology company in HCMC, vietnam

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE STUDENT’S NAME: TÔN N NHƯ QUỲNH 
 STUDENT’ CODE: 1357010192 SUPERVISOR: Ms PHẠM THÁI B O NGỌC, MA HO CHI MINH CITY June 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgement I Introduction II Report on the practical internship at CodeLink III Experiences from the practical internship IV Suggestions for improvement 12 V Conclusion 14 VI References 15 VII Appendices 16 VIII Appendices 19 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank the staffs of CodeLink for enabling me to work in their office to observe and participate in their daily operations, and for also placing their great trust in my capabilities at a very point: Executive Manager, Mr Daniel Campel for his vital support and assistance CTO, Mr Nguyen Khac Anh for the authentic advice and useful guidance I would like to express my very great appreciation to Ms Pham Thai Bao Ngoc, MA in English Linguistics & Literature - my research supervisor, for her patient guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and useful critiques for this internship report Her willingness to give her time so generously has been appreciated Finally, I would like to send my gratitude towards the love of my family – my parents and my little sister who always keep me going further and give me a great encouragement in every step that I take I INTRODUCTION From a general perspective, internship duration not only provides students with opportunities to gain hands-on experience, but also develops their professional skills By working, students are provided with opportunities to apply theories that they have learned into actual practice From my perspective, students will also be challenged to examine how their work attitudes, yet, their professional and soft skills perform in work environment I had been frequently struggling to answer to the question how it was to work in a company until my university required every student to a month-internship in a particular professional company for the purpose of gaining experience and graduating Later, I found myself in a lucky position that I had been accepted to Marketing and Management Assistant position at CodeLink company During an internship period, I had an answer to the above question as well as an invaluable opportunity to practically apply my knowledge into reality CodeLink is a software development service company, which was founded by two enthusiastic talented people, Daniel Campel and Nguyen Khac Anh The business concentrates upon product development, innovative solution, and process to ensure customer satisfaction and market success Similarly, the company commits itself to best practice Agile and Extreme Programming methodologies to the end that improves software quality and instantly responds to alternation Especially, company’s teams build stateof-art Ruby, Node.JS, React, iOS and Android applications from scratch Codelink has run its the business since 2016 and the company’s headquarter in Vietnam is located at Level 55 Truong Dinh Street, Ward 6, District 3, HCMC Because this company is newly born in the software market, it is required to operate correctly and effectively by detailed concentration into its management system where I laid my very first initial footprints My job responsibilities were mainly focused on translating which includes the tasks of delivering English blog posts and news to Vietnamese and vice versa, arranging paperwork for back-office operation, and preparing marketing content for various social media channels II REPORT ON THE PRACTICAL INTERNSHIP AT CODELINK Besides a headquarter in Vietnam, CodeLink also has its first branch located in Singapore, and a strategic vision of two founders is to turn their software company into a professional service at a regional scale Nevertheless, most of my co-workers were excellent Vietnamese developers and programmers whose English competencies were not fluent and clear That the company has one specific rule in “CodeLink Bible” compulsorily requires everybody inside the office to communicate in English for the purpose of creating and building an English-speaking environment and speaking habits This working condition was unexpectedly great opportunity for me to use my language skills on a daily basis I personally witnessed a significant improvement in my language capability as well as others after one week of entirely using English for work On the other hand, my work fields covered enormously with information technology, software development strategies, and contracts Working under new concepts about technology, I had gradually gained for myself so much useful and interesting knowledge by building a self-study habit I usually made a study list of small tasks including new skills and information that I had to acquaint myself with in advance Whenever I finished my assigned tasks, Mr Campel – my direct supervisor – would carefully ascertain the results and give me his constructive and reliable advice on how I could make a further improvement next time Equally important, the company’s culture highly emphasizes on effective communication, which is important for the daily operation of the business Without good communication, especially in software development, the internal or external structure of one particular program can face numerous challenges that can lead to system faults and incompetence At a basic scale, the company increases its regular interaction via communicative system, which boosts conversations across different teams Due to the seamless interaction between my co-workers and me, it had greatly facilitated my working performance and job satisfaction thanks to continuous connection For instance, whenever I had a problem translating a sentence in CTO’s blog post, I could instantly ask him for clearer clarification via internal communication tool – Slack Study course at the English faculty has kindly provided me a large amount of information which comprises many applicable theories and practical skills in translation and interpreting, especially the subject of “Theory of Translation” and “Translation Practice” Employment soft skills, coupled with translation knowledge, likewise played an important role in my internship, for instance “Presentation skills” and “English for the Office” In reality, translation trainees not only should be a master of translation techniques, but they also must possess background information in the fields that they are translating In general, literary translation, which carefully maintains stylistic figures of language, is very different from technical translation, which is aimed at one specialized field During internship period, I handled various types of writing, especially technical texts (blog posts and guidance), which serve to increase readers’ knowledge, and to provide readers with a better comprehension Obviously, accuracy and consistency in choosing equivalence translation are extremely fundamental and knowingly difficult to achieve Technical translation techniques are mainly used in informative texts which require a translator to explain new terminologies; therefore, these techniques were deliberately applied throughout my translation process This type of translation extensively embraces the effectiveness of communicative translation that seeks for transferring the exact information and messages (translating contract, receipt and invoice) rather than linguistic features Peter Newmark (1988) pointed out in his book that “communicative translation attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership” (p 41) With this in mind, I intentionally tried to immerse myself in the technical language context by reading technological materials, and carefully sought precision in every translation Since inaccurate and poor translation in information technology and legal documentations may publicly damage the corporate image, and undermine translator’s credentials, which is the last thing any translator would expect As previously mentioned, the main purpose of translating a technical text is to precisely render message and information to its readers Technical translation covers many kinds of specialized texts; as a consequence, requirements of a comprehensive knowledge, and mastery of relevant terminologies should be highly considered Understanding the source text is the first step in the process of translating, and this step could only be taken by mastery of the source language and technological domain In fact, I subconsciously divided a translating process into different stages The first step is to get the main idea of the whole text for assimilating the text and its meanings Then the translator will need to understand the text in depth and attach himself/herself to the specific words, for example neologism1, in order to give more meanings to the thoughts of the original author These terms generally require people to possess an adequate knowledge of terminologies, which are used in the field Indeed, a professional translator also has to be an excellent writer when I have to make sure the final text is easy to read, aside from maintaining the ideas from the source text The translator may need to re-organize some parts of a technical text if he/she feels this would help the readers to better understand Then, once this is achieved, the text must be reinterpreted and adapted to the target language By this way, the translator’s responsibility is not only in translation but they also act as an editor : a new word or expression or a new meaning of a word Neologism (n.d.) In Oxford Learner's Dictionaries Retrieved June 4, 2017, from http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/neologism#neologism III EXPERIENCES FROM THE PRACTICAL INTERNSHIP On the whole, the one-month internship at CodeLink is tremendously a valuable experience to me Since the apprentice not only gave me the first-hand experience to apply classroom’s theories into reality, but also particularly developed my personal outlook on life In fact, I would like to describe my work experiences in details about which skills I have gained so far and how I coped with different arising problems Firstly, it is true to say that working as a translator and management assistant in technological company was a tremendous responsibility to a first-hand trainee, especially to me The weighty duties that I had received, in another way, turned out to be a company’s acknowledgement of my crucial competence I was extremely grateful for the fact that CodeLink had significantly put their great trust on me I was given many translating tasks, which translation concepts were about contracts and technological articles Needless to say, that duty had helped me enormously sharpening my translation techniques as well as enriching my vocabulary range As identified by Vietnam Labor Law, employment contract must include all of the terms that are stated in the code including many important aspects such as payment, increment, insurance, rights, obligations and termination While preparing labor documentation, I consistently kept in mind that the verbal language used has to be properly formal and exact, yet the contract content has a great meaning to its bearers In the same way, the documentation may be used to testify or verify any possible legal case; therefore, I must be distinctly prudent in choosing formal and recognizable equivalences An illustration of finding a suitable translation is when I was given a task of translating an English labor contract to Vietnamese, and I also needed to an extra clarification whenever possible After examining the English contract, which I found it increasingly demanding because I did not know much about human resources areas Therefore, I should a thorough research in Vietnam Labor Law and its writing style for the purpose of locating which aspects are needed to be included in the employment contract It was a good luck for me that both English and Vietnamese contracts share the majority of similar concepts and legal terms which already defined and utilized between the two languages, for instance, allowance – phụ cấp; performace bonus – thưởng thành tích; increment policy – chế độ tăng lương; obligation – nghĩa vụ It is necessary to clarify what is meant by HR professional terms such as gross–net salary relating to Vietnam compulsory insurance laws, confidentiality agreements no sharing without authorization, and maternity leave for female employee and premium payment This specialized information has helped me gain a better understanding of which rights that employee is deserved to embrace and protected by laws As a result, I can prevent inequality and defend misconduct acts for me and other people Likewise, it is commonly acknowledged that translating plus preparing contract documentation demands a translator with an assiduous attention and proper skills in using a high and clear language formality The correlation between translating lexical vocabularies and writing official Vietnamese statements has enriched my mothertongue language skills to a greater transparency Besides translating labor contract, my supervisor had requested me to translate technical blog posts which were contributed to Vietnamese programmer communities and raised brand awareness To be honest, I had not known anything about programming and not understood about information technology, in order words, I must inquisitively start to learn about them from a very basic principle in order to accomplish given duties Generally, most of the blog posts was written to give its readers a simple method on how to encode functions or orders into computer program Henceforth, the writing style was kept to a publicly easy and understandable manner without any advance level of sentence structures or multi-layer meanings Communicative translation is widely used in this type of text that eliminates some aspects of linguistic features, and pursues an objective of sufficient information This technique surprisingly provides translator more freedom in translating and choosing equivalences Important to realize that translating technical blog posts are not lying on translation techniques, but it is emphasized new neologism or terminologies which its correct meanings will affect translation quality As explained by Peter Newmark (1988), “the central difficulty in technical translation is usually the new terminology.” (p.152) I personally think that computer programmers, in particular, prefer to use neologism, resulted in a large amount of newly invented coined terms such as (hackathon ), abbreviations (app – software application – phần mềm ng dụng), acronyms (UI – user interface – tương tác người dùng, UX – user experience – trải nghiệm người dùng) Computer programmers mainly use these specialized terms to communicate within their communities for the matter of saving time and accelerating work speed Without the basic knowledge of how software application is built, it is asserted that translating technological texts would be hard to complete, yet it may consume a considerable time to discover a suitable translation and finish the task To familiarize with information technology, I began to learn about it gradually on a daily basis From a starting point, I tried to acquaint myself with terms that appear everyday, and people frequently discuss about such as iOS, Android and Window – these names represent for mobile device operating systems (hệ điều hành di động) Different programmers favour various programming languages (ngôn ngữ lập trình), for example, React Native, JavaScript, Node.js, HTML5, and Ruby on Rails, and programmers tend to permanently keep using one particular language for building an application, except for professional individuals who can fluently perform in variety of programming language Complimentary to platforms and programming tools, building a successful application works effectively in manageable software development process, when I need to study about Agile Methods (Phương pháp phát triển phần mềm linh hoạt) Later, to prove my research on Agile and share the knowledge with my colleagues, my supervisor required me to prepare a presentation about this method, which I completed successfully On the other hand, it is certainly true that any employee need to acquire many soft skills, which are quite beneficial in personal life as well, in order to greater succeed According to American National Association of Colleges and Employers, Job Outlook 2016 (p.30), nearly 80 percent employers looked for teamwork skills in Class of 2016 graduates, while written communication skills and problem-solving skills were also highly valued Those skills such as the ability to work in teams, think critically, build healthy colleague relationship, maintain work-life balance are : a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development This event lasts between a day and a week Retrieved June 12, 2017, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon 10 extremely essential as well as facilitate employee’s performance This will in turn create a more enjoying, cordial and less stressful work environment for me The most important experience I have learnt from this apprenticeship is to maintain a sense of responsibly This gaining has been affecting me in every aspects of my life Since I worked part-time and my working hours were distinctly different from my co-workers, as the result, my employer sometimes forgot to keep track of my work hours However, I never used that benefit to arrive late at the office or work less than expected Working responsibility is not just about go to work on time, but there are also basic responsibilities such as meeting deadlines (or complete duties prior to deadline), exceeding performance standards, and seeking for employment’s satisfaction In addition, because of a wonderful work environment at CodeLink, I hope that in the future I can look for a similar position where the employer places emphasis on its employees that drive a successful business together, and everybody is satisfied with their jobs 11 IV SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT Generally, this one-month internship strengthened my résumé by giving me visible work experience and providing me credentials to decide my future career There is no denying that the number of compulsory courses comprised in this fouryear curriculum has outstandingly laid the firm foundation for working in an international environment as an effective English speaker In other words, due to a considerable and comprehensive expertise in English language, I am positively confident and well prepared to promptly communicate in English Indeed, I would like to send my sincere gratitude towards the faculty’s teachers because they have been working restlessly to deliver their vast knowledge, original passion and diligent inspiration to students Notwithstanding those positive effects, there are still many existing downsides of the curriculum that restricts students from obtaining their dream careers I hereby would like to state several current problems and my suggestions for improvement of the teaching quality at our English Faculty Firstly, all of the final translating examinations are performed in a conventional method, in which only paper dictionaries are allowed to complete the tasks This testing method is aimed to examine how student’s ability to render the English language naturally in limited time In fact, this method is a way of training independence for students from electrical devices, except from a few restrictions One visible constraint of this testing method is that students are pulled away from how translating approach functions in usual working environment; yet, they are mainly graded by the ability to remember huge vocabularies and find suitable translation with paper dictionaries As far as I know, technological application in translation such as online dictionaries and software is widespread and commonly utilized in every step of translating process My small suggestion for our faculty is to alter the testing method to computer-based examination that gives permission to students to access Internet and perfect theirs work in a cautious and punctual way Similarly, the curriculum may also add a training course that teaches students how to use and exploit technology in translating process Another recommendation I would like to address hereby is about an update version in the teaching content in terms of textbooks as well as an additional course relating to business fields such as commerce, economy and technology Namely Vietnamese job market, there is a high demand of workforce in such fields that requires its labour to possess both eloquent English language and specialized knowledge in economic areas As a result, students may also have another choice of their potential career as well as they can apply their translation techniques in different and various perspectives In accordance with the course of study, this suggestion should be combined with the deduction in language skill subjects in the first two years due to heavy and overload content coverage, and time-consuming problems Furthermore, while subjects relating to translation are vastly concentrated, interpreting courses happen to be existed only in two subjects Interpreting and which can debilitate students’ intention to pursue a further career as an interpreter I personally think that interpretation is crucial and challenging field needing more serious attention since interpreting profession is an effective way to thoroughly employ and apply what I have learnt into real situation Equally important, observation from an actual interpreting and translating process stimulates students’ imagination and prediction about what skills, techniques or qualities they need to acquire beforehand It will be great that the faculty can regularly organize an excursion, a seminar, or a talk show for translators and interpreters working in the field to share their experiences about how to accomplish the job and overcome difficulties I eagerly recommend that faculty and students should share more quality time for communication and interaction in a friendly and constructive manner 13 V CONCLUSION To sum up, internship is a perfect way to sample all the theories in the classrooms and to implement them in practice The past month of my internship has been very instructive for me This practicum report provided me a channel to revise my actual capacity through high and low achievements, and to reshape my skills and thoughts on how to work smarter and more effectively CodeLink, the company that I adored, had offered me opportunities to learn and develop myself in many challenging areas A lot of the tasks and activities that I have worked on are familiar with which I studied in English Translation and Interpreting course Furthermore, I was positioned in many departments where I perform a plenty of various tasks This gave me the chance to find out which areas I want work in after my education Besides translating articles, another area that I found interesting is marketing & communication I learned many things about viral marketing by learning about social media channels and how the administrational process occurs inside back office It is certain to claim that the course at English Faculty has provided a solid foundation in translating and many other soft skills Moreover, in order to successfully work in a business organization, I need to further practice and acquire much new information That is the reason “keep learning” is my favorite quote which I always remind myself whenever I face failures and difficulties As Albert Einstein once said: “I have no special talent I am only passionately curious” 14 VI REFERENCE Hosseinimanesh, L., & Dastjerdi, H V (2013) Technical Translation: A Study of Interference in Three Persian Translations of “Software Engineering” Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol 4, No 1, 156-163 Doi:10.4304/jltr.4.1.156-163 Newmark, P (1988) A Textbook of Translation Prentice-Hall International National Association of Colleges and Employers (2015) Job Outlook 2016 15 VII APPENDIX Nh ng “lò ấp tr ng” Bên cạnh coworking space ch yếu cung cấp không gian vật lý TP.HCM, số mơ hình, cơng ty hỗ trợ khởi nghiệp thật sự, coi coworking space dịch vụ cộng thêm để hỗ trợ bạn trẻ khởi nghiệp thành hình, trở thành nơi kết nối bạn trẻ có ý tưởng, có mơ hình kinh doanh sáng tạo, tiềm với quỹ đầu tư mạo hiểm, nhà đầu tư thiên thần (cách gọi nhà đầu tư bỏ vốn vào startup) Coworking space mà công ty c a Teo làm việc hồn tồn miễn phí c a The Ventures - cơng ty chun có hoạt động tự vấn, góp ý cho ý tưởng khởi nghiệp, tìm kiếm nhà đầu tư hoạt động TP.HCM từ tháng 3-2016 Vượt lên khái niệm coworking space, cơng ty The Ventures tự định nghĩa “seed startup accelerator” - người tăng tốc “hạt giống” startup tiềm Source: http://tuoitre.vn/tin/nhip-song-tre/20161121/o-van-phong-khoi-nghiep- phang-ban-tre-ban-tieng-anh-nhu-gio/1191697.html The incubators Besides the co-working space centers which mainly provide physical spaces in HCMC, some other company models which truly support startup consider the fact that co-working space is one of added services to support youth startups, and a connecting place for young people with innovative business ideas which are potential targets for venture capital funds or angel investors (individual investors invest in startups) The co-working space, where Teo’s company is working, completely provided at no cost by TheVentures Started to operate in HCMC from March 2016, the company specializes in consulting activities such as giving advice to startups and helping startups looking for investors 16 More than a co-working space concept, companies like TheVentures defines itself as the "seed startup accelerator" 17 REACT NATIVE ENDLESS SCROLLING AND PULL TO REFRESH Problem List view is a common UI element It is used extensively in web and mobile layouts This post will introduce you to the implementation of ListView in React Native We will also handle two behaviors used frequently when users interact with a list view: pull-to-refresh and scrolling Here is a demo animation of this simple app: This app has one endless list of posts Users scroll to the bottom to load more posts A loading wheel displays to indicate network loading status Users can pull to refresh the content that will initiate a fetch of content for the first page Breakdown ListView ListView already provides properties to trigger scrolling and pulling gestures: 18 RefreshControl.onRefresh triggers when users perform a “Pull-to-refresh” gesture It also has the built-in UI that reveals the loading icon when you pull the list down We’ll use this to load the first page and refresh the list onEndReached fires up when the list view scrolls to the last row We’ll use this trigger to fetch the next page and append the new posts to the list Source:https://www.codelink.io/2016/10/24/endless-scrolling-pull-fresh-in-reactnative.html REACT NATIVE: CH C NĂNG CUỘN VÔ TẬN VÀ KÉO Đ LÀM MỚI TRANG Vấn đ Chế độ xem danh sách phần biến c a giao diện người dùng (UI) Chế độ sử dụng rộng rãi thiết kế web điện thoại di động Bài giới thiệu cho bạn việc thực ListView React Native Chúng ta xử lý hai hành vi sử dụng thường xuyên người dùng tương tác với chế độ xem danh sách: kéo để làm cuộn trang Đây hình ảnh động mô tả đơn giản ch c c a ng dụng này: ng dụng có danh sách đăng vô tận Người dùng cuộn xuống cuối để tải thêm viết Một vòng tròn hiển thị để trạng thái tải thông tin Người dùng kéo để làm nội dung, động tác bắt đầu tìm nạp nội dung thêm vào trang Gi i ListView ListView cung cấp thuộc tính để kích hoạt cử cuộn kéo: 19 • RefreshControl.onRefresh kích hoạt người dùng thực cử "Kéo-đểlàm mới" Nó có giao diện người dùng tích hợp sẵn biểu tượng tải bạn kéo danh sách xuống Chúng ta sử dụng ch c để tải trang làm danh sách • onEndReached khởi động lên danh sách viết cuộn đến hàng cuối Chúng tơi sử dụng trình kích hoạt để tìm trang nối đăng vào danh sách 20 VIII APPENDIX PHOTOS Mr Nguyen Khac Anh, CTO at CodeLink Ms Nguyen Thi Nhu Quynh, Software Programer at CodeLink 21 ... work in after my education Besides translating articles, another area that I found interesting is marketing & communication I learned many things about viral marketing by learning about social... immerse myself in the technical language context by reading technological materials, and carefully sought precision in every translation Since inaccurate and poor translation in information technology. .. demands a translator with an assiduous attention and proper skills in using a high and clear language formality The correlation between translating lexical vocabularies and writing official Vietnamese