Luận văn thạc sĩ VNU ULIS nghiên cứu đánh giá phê bình bản dịch anh việt trong lĩnh vực văn học (văn xuôi)

INTRODUCTION

Rationale of the study

In the era of globalization, there is a great need to exchange culture and literature among nations As a result, over the last ten years, together with the development of the Internet, a large number of literary works have been translated into Vietnamese, as Trần Đăng Khoa ( in CPV, 11 August 2012) remarks: „the majority of books available in Vietnamese market are translated ones, thus, Vietnamese readers are updated with the world literature situations‟ Even Nobel Prize or Goncourt prize winning books need just one or two months to be introduced to Vietnamese readers (Ngô Hương Giang, 15/01/2013) Several translated books are of excellent quality and have received prizes for translations from the Association of Vietnamese Writers, such as Faust (translated by

Quang Chiến in 2001), Life of Pi (translated by Trinh Lữ in 2005), Slumpdog millionaire

(translated by Nguyễn Bích Lan in 2010), among many others (Nguyễn Văn Dân, in Văn Nghệ Trẻ, 12 August 2012)

However, it should be noted that there are several very poor Vietnamese translations of the world famous novels Recently the phrase “thảm họa dịch thuật” (NB: „a translation disaster‟) has come to use in Vietnamese newspapers to refer to translations of very poor quality If you type this phrase in the Google, there will appear about 544,000 results in just 0.13 seconds (as seen on 5 May, 2013) What does this number tell us? This means that many literary translations have been judged as being extremely bad The examples of

“translation disasters” are Mật mã Da Vinci (The Da Vinci Code written by Dan Brown, an American writer, translated by Đỗ Thu Hà in 2005), Hạt Cơ Bản (Atomized or The Elementary Particles) and Bản đồ và vùng đất (The Map and the Territory written by

Michel Houellebecq, a French writer, translated by Cao Việt Dũng in 2012) The Vietnamese translations of these novels have been criticized for containing “too many mistakes and bad writing style” (Tùy Phong, 2012) The reader even quotes unacceptable errors from these translations, such as “Bố em chết cách đây một tuần”, nàng nói “Ung thư tử cung” (“My dad passed away a week ago”, she said, “uterus cancer” (in the original text: “intestine cancer”) (in the translation of Hạt cơ bản by Cao Việt Dũng) Meanwhile, the Vietnamese translation Mật mã Da Vinci includes bad rendering of words or phrases, besides a great number of grammar and vocabulary mistakes The translation Lolita by

Dương Tường, a well-known translator, has also been criticized for poor translation of some expressions One of the examples is the translation of the phrase “on the dotted lines” It was translated by Dương Tường as “trên dòng kẻ bằng những dấu chấm” (Tùy Phong, 2012), while it should be “trên giấy tờ kê khai” (Nguyễn Văn Dân, 2012a) Dương Tường word-for-word rendering of the phrase makes it ambiguous, and even awkward

The translations Mật mã Da Vinci and Bản đồ và vùng đất were recalled by the publishing houses (Nguyễn Vĩnh Nguyên, 2012), and Lolita will have to be edited for the next edition (Nguyễn Văn Dân, 2012b)

The causes of poor literary translations, as pointed out by Vietnamese critics and researchers, may include the translator‟s incompetence, a lack of theoretical framework for translation studies, unavailability of literary translation criticism in Vietnam, and, partly, irresponsibility of publishing houses Firstly, several Vietnamese literary translators currently working in different specializations do not master theories of translation, thus

„they pay no attention, even ignore grammar rules of the Vietnamese language‟ (Nguyễn Văn Dân, 2013) Nguyễn Văn Dân (2013) maintains that in Vietnam there is still not any in-depth study on translation In his opinion, theories of translation, especially principles of translation, are crucial for translators to be able to produce a translation of high quality

In addition, the current situation of translated literary books of poor quality also attributes to the unavailability of literary translation criticism from the professionals Phạm Xuân Nguyên, a literary critic and the President of Hanoi Writers‟ Association (Mi Ly, 2012), states that “the three steps of the translation process include translating, editing and evaluating Among these three factors we are able to do only one, which is translating…

In the publishing houses at the present there is not a person to proofread the translation of a book, let alone someone to compare the original and the translation” Also according to Phạm Xuân Nguyên (as cited in Ngọc Duy, 2012), while there is a boom of translated literary works, and translated books of all kinds are flooding the Vietnamese market, rarely available are comments, analysis or criticism of these translations In addition to the abovementioned causes, the poor quality of many literary translations is also attributed to the irresponsibility of some publishing houses, which under the pressure of competition split the original text into many parts and assign them to different translators Thus, the translations turn out to be inconsistent with many mistakes (Nguyễn Văn Phước, cited in Nguyễn Việt Chiến and Ngọc Bi, 2012)

As the critic Phạm Xuân Nguyên (in Ngọc Duy, 2012) notes, one of the necessary steps to enhance the quality of literary translations is evaluation And at the present, in Vietnam there are still not any in-depth studies on translation (Nguyễn Văn Dân, 2013), let alone on translation evaluation One may argue that there are some MA theses on translation studies being done at the University of Languages and International Studies, VNU However, these theses, due to the scope constraints, managed either to investigate one aspect of translation, such as translation equivalence (see Văn Thị Thanh Bình, 2001; Đặng Thị Mai Duyên, 2006; Vũ Thị Thanh Hoa, 2009, and so on), or to provide translation quality assessment of only one chapter of a novel (see Lê Mỹ Hạnh, 2010;

Hoàng Thị Diễm Hằng, 2012, and so on) Although some of these MA theses applied the translation quality assessment model by House (1997), in evaluating the quality of the English-Vietnamese translations, they did not provide in-depth theoretical bases for the model More specifically, there was no justification for choosing House‟s translation quality assessment model (1997) for the study, and the steps in House‟s model were not followed strictly 1

From what has been presented above, it can be seen that there is a strong need for in- depth studies on translation quality assessment, in particular, a need for the comprehensive application of House‟s (1997) translation quality assessment model, which is the rationale of this research.

Aims of the study

This study attempts to evaluate the translation quality of English-Vietnamese fictional prose, more specifically, the translation quality of English-Vietnamese short stories In order to do this, first, we will investigate literature on translation quality assessment; second, we will apply House‟s model to assessing the quality of Vietnamese translations of five Australian short stories Thus, the research aims are:

1 Examples of incomplete application of House‟s translation quality assessment in these MA theses: the sub- categories under Field, such as Textual Means, in House‟s model, were not investigated, and the manifestations of cultural filtering in the translation text were not touched upon (see Hoàng Thị Diễm Hằng,

- to evaluate English – Vietnamese fictional prose translations through some of the Vietnamese culture-specific linguistic features; and

- to evaluate the quality of Vietnamese translations of the five Australian short stories with House‟s model.

Research questions

The aims of this study, as indicated above, are to explore the translation quality of English

- Vietnamese fictional prose, more specifically, of Australian short stories by using House‟s translation quality assessment model To achieve the proposed aims, we will commit ourselves to addressing the following research questions:

1 What are some of the Vietnamese culture-specific linguistic features that make Vietnamese translations of Australian short stories target-text focused?

2 At what levels in House‟s model are the Vietnamese translation texts and the original Australian short story texts equivalent?

Scope of the study

As stated above, this study will confine itself only to investigating the quality of contemporary English-Vietnamese fictional prose translations Fictional prose includes novels and short stories (Barton & Hudson, 1996) Novels are „extended pieces of prose fiction‟ (Cuddon, 2013, p 477), and a novel is usually between 60,000 words to 200,000 words long Short stories are prose narratives „of indeterminate length, but too short to be published separately as novels usually are‟ (Cuddon, 2013, p 653) The length of short stories may vary, but it is agreed that a short story may be between 1,600 words to about 20,000 words (Maugham, cited in Cuddon, 2013)

The present study will focus on the quality of translations of English-Vietnamese short stories, more specifically, the quality of Vietnamese translations of Australian short stories The data for the study were taken from the collection Truyện ngắn Úc – Australian

Short Stories (2005), a book published as a bilingual edition in English and Vietnamese

The criteria for choosing the five Australian short stories include: (i) the stories are contemporary, i.e the 20 th century, fictional prose; (ii) the authors of the stories are well- known in Australia (based on the introduction in each story in the collection); and (iii) the translator, Trịnh Lữ, is a prize-winning one

The titles of the five stories and their translations are (i) „Southern Skies‟ by D

Malouf (1985) – „Trời Nam lồng lộng‟, (ii) „Abbreviation‟ by T Winton (1973) – „Tên viết tắt‟, (iii) „Joe‟ by P Carey (1973) – „Thằng Joe‟, (iv) „The Hottest Night of the Century‟ by G Adams (1979) – „Đêm nóng nhất thế kỷ‟, and (v) „Hostages‟ by F

Zwicky (1983) – „Con tin‟ The total word count of all the five original stories is 19,725.

Methodology

This research is an evaluative study of Vietnamese translations of Australian short stories The research approaches employed include qualitative and quantitative analyses

The main approach is qualitative analyses by means of House‟s model, while quantitative analyses are just used to validate the results of the qualitative ones The quantitative analyses, based on House‟s (2006b) research methods, comprise the frequency or concordance of some linguistic features under discussion of both the originals and their translations In addition, the present study also employs Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task/Test (MDCT), and focus group interview to collect the data from Vietnamese native speakers Applying House‟s model involves comparison of the original texts and their translations, and explanation, together with quantitative analyses and MDCT, therefore, this study is descriptive, comparative, statistic and interpretive by nature.

Contribution of the study

As mentioned earlier, at the present in Vietnam there is still a lack of in-depth studies on quality evaluation of translated fictional prose, in general, and English- Vietnamese translated literature, in particular Our purpose in this study is to evaluate the translation quality of Australian short stories by using House‟s model, thus, we hope to make a contribution to research into criticism of English-Vietnamese fictional prose translations, in particular, as well as to research into criticism of translated literature and to translation studies, in general Furthermore, through this study we would like to confirm previous research findings on the linguistic features of Vietnamese communicative preferences and norms, such as using a variety of addressing words, employing more verbs than nouns, and so on In addition, the research approaches used in this study include qualitative and quantitative, together with research tools, such as Multiple-choice Discourse Completion

Tasks/Tests (MDCT), which is often employed in pragmatics research, and focus group interview In terms of research methods, we expect to bring to the field the application of multiple research methods and tools to validate the research results Finally, we also hope to make a contribution to the teaching of translation to Vietnamese students The findings of this study may be used to design activities to develop students‟ communicative and language competence, while they are improving their translation skills.

DEVELOPMENT

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON TRANSLATION QUALITY

The two concepts important for translation evaluation are translation and translation quality Translation evaluation normally goes together with a theory of translation

Therefore, different views of translation itself lead to different notions of translation quality, and different ways of evaluating it In this chapter, first, the concept of translation will be reviewed; and second, the concepts of translation quality and translation quality assessment will be discussed in three different schools of thought In the third section, four translation quality assessment models, which have been developed from the three research traditions, will be described In the fourth section, House‟s (1997) model will be presented in detail

1.1 Concept of translation in three different approaches

Translation is defined differently depending on the theoretical approach that one takes In this section, the concept of translation will be reviewed in three different schools of thought, namely literature-oriented approaches, skopos-related approaches and linguistics- based approaches The discussion on the concept of translation will centre on the two issues: the relationship between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT), and relationship between the features in the text itself and how they are perceived by human agents

The representative of literature-oriented approaches is Toury (1978, 1995) Concerning the notion of translation, according to Toury (1995, in House, 2001a, p 130), translation equivalence is not a relationship between the source text and the target text, but a

„functional-relational concept‟, i.e a set of relationships which has been found to distinguish appropriate from non-appropriate modes of translation performance for the receptor‟s culture Toury maintains that translation activities should be regarded as having cultural significance Consequently, the translator has to play a social role, i.e., to fulfill a function assigned by a community – to the activity, its practitioners and/or their products – in a way which is regarded appropriate in its own terms of reference (Toury, 1978/revised 1995/reprinted 2000)

Toury proposes a non-comparative model for translation quality assessment, which investigates only the target text (TT) (see Chapter 2)

A functional approach refers to the production of translation which has become known as „Skopos theory‟ (see Vermeer, 1989/reprinted 2000; Nord, 1991, and so on) The word skopos is „a technical term for the aim or purpose of a translation‟ (Vermeer, 1989/reprinted 2000, p 221) In the views of Skopos theory, human action, including the action of translating, is determined by its purpose (Vermeer, 1989/reprinted 2000) The researchers of this school use the terms „skopos‟, „function‟, and „purpose‟ interchangeably (Malmkjổr, 2005, p 35)

Skopos theory defines translation as a purposeful trans-cultural activity and argues that the linguistic form of the TT is determined by the purpose it is meant to fulfill The main point of Skopos theory is that it is not the source text (ST), or its effects on the source text recipient, or the function assigned to it by the author that determines the translation process and the linguistic structure of the target text, but „the prospective function or purpose of the target text as determined by the initiator‟s (i.e client‟s) needs‟, (Vermeer, 1989/reprinted 2000, p 221) As a result, the purpose or skopos is largely constrained by the target text user (whether reader or listener) and his or her situation and cultural background This purpose should be the most important, i.e more important in shaping the target text than the form and content of the source text

In the development of this approach, a text is considered to be its author‟s „offer of information‟ to its projected recipient, and a source text and its translation may move apart depending on its readers (Vermeer, 1989/reprinted 2000, pp 222-3) Also in the view of Skopos theorists, translators have come to be viewed as target text authors and as competent experts in translational action

The term „linguistic approaches‟ has been used to refer to (i) theoretical models that represent translation as a (mainly) linguistic process, and are therefore informed chiefly by linguistic theory, and (ii) a diverse range of studies that apply findings, concepts and methods from linguistics to explain specific aspects of translation (Saldanha, 2009, p

148) Prominent scholars of linguistic approaches to translation include Catford (1965), Nida (1964/reprinted 2000), Jakobson (1959/reprinted 2000), Koller (1979/1989), House

The concept of translation has been discussed by scholars of linguistic approaches through time, such as Catford (1965), Nida and Taber (1969/reprinted 1982), Jakobson (1959/reprinted 2000), Frawley (1984/reprinted 2000), Newmark (1988a, 1988b, 1991), Steiner (2001), House (2001a), Malmkjổr (2005), and so on

Early linguists see translation as a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another, as „the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL)‟ (Catford, 1965, p 20); or „reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style‟ (Nida & Taber, 1969/reprinted 1982, p

Three categories of translation described by the Russian-American structuralist, Jakobson (1959/reprinted 2000, p 114) in his seminal paper „On linguistic aspects of translation‟ are: (i) intralingual translation, i.e „an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language‟; (ii) interlingual translation, i.e „an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language‟; and (iii) intersemiotic translation, i.e „an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems‟ In Frawley‟s views (1984/reprinted 2000, p 250), translation means „re-codification‟, and translation is nothing sort of an essential problem of semiosis: it is the problem of transfer codes

Newmark (1988a) makes a distinction between communicative and semantic translation

Newmark‟s (1988a, p 39) view is that while communicative translation attempts to

„produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original‟, semantic translation attempts to „render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original‟

Newmark (ibid) further points out that communicative translation is the target reader focused, and semantic translation is the source text focused

In more recent times, several linguistically oriented works on translation, such as by Hatim and Mason (1990), Baker (1992), Steiner (2001), Malmkjổr (2010), and so on, have made valuable contributions to evaluating a translation by widening the scope of translation studies to include linguistic concerns with speech act theory, pragmatics, socio- linguistics, stylistics and discourse analysis

Steiner (2001) focuses on intralingual and interlingual versions of a text, and the notion of translation Steiner (ibid.) asserts that each individual translation is text production under constraints of a source text, and further points out the relationship between translation and the levels of linguistic theory, ranging from the extremes of literal to free translation The three levels at which features and structures can be preserved are lexico-grammar, semantics and register Preservation on lexico-grammatical level would result in a relatively literal translation, and preservation on register level – a relatively free translation

Hatim and Mason (1990) and Malmkjổr (2010) discuss the social theory of language, known as the systemic-functional model or functionalist linguistics, which is influenced by insights from anthropology (from work of Malinowski) and linguistics (from the work of Firth and others scholars of London School) This new approach provides translation studies with an alternative view which approaches language as text Malinowski (1935, cited in House, 2006a) argues that to understand the meaning of a linguistic unit one needs to take into account the interrelationship between linguistic units and the context of the situation In this view, translation becomes „rather the placing of linguistic symbols against the cultural background of a society than the rendering of words by their equivalents in another language‟ (Malinowski, 1935, cited in House, 2006a , p.343)

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Chapter 2 consists of two sections: (i) the research methodology that the present study employs and (ii) the data collection The research methodology section, in its turn, includes two main parts: (i) mixed approaches (qualitative and quantitative) and specific methods, and (ii) analytical framework The data collection involves three sources: data for qualitative analyses, data for quantitative analyses, and data for analyses of translation naturalness in the TTs

The present study adopts House‟s TQA model to evaluate the quality of the translations of five Australian short stories, i.e qualitative analyses of both STs and TTs, and adapts House‟s (2006b) methods in assessing the quality of English-German translations, which involve quantitative analyses of some linguistic features under discussion In addition, the study also employs Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task (MDCT), a survey questionnaire, followed by a focus group interview, to measure native readers‟ response to the naturalness of a number of sentences taken from the TTs Thus, the first section of Chapter 2 will discuss mixed approaches, comprising qualitative and quantitative ones, and specific methods The second section will describe analytical framework, namely qualitative analytical procedure, quantitative analytical procedure, MDCT, and focus group interview, in detail

2.1.1 Mixed approaches and specific methods 2.1.1.1 Mixed approaches: qualitative and quantitative

House‟s TQA model is that of qualitative research Qualitative research is typically labeled as „non-numerical research‟ (Brown & Rodgers, 2002, p 15) Three kinds of qualitative data include interviews, observations and documents (Patton, 2002) The documents can be „written materials and other documents from organizational, clinical, or program records‟, and so on (Patton, 2002, p 4) In addition, the data may appear as words in the form of “rich” linguistic descriptions, rather than numbers (Yamashita,

1996, p 37) In doing qualitative research, the researcher “identifies, studies, and then synthesizes the data” (Yamashita, 1996, p 40)

The data for qualitative analyses in the present study are: (i) documents (the five Australian short stories taken from the collection Australian Short Stories and their translations in Vietnamese (see Appendix A and Appendix B); and (ii) focus group interview The original texts and their translation texts will be analyzed and compared in detail, and the translation quality of the TTs will be evaluated, using House‟s model The focus group interview (see Appendix J.1) was carried out after Multiple-choice discourse completion task, a research survey on the naturalness of a number of sentences taken from the translation texts

The advantages of qualitative approach include the facilitation of „study of issues in depth and detail‟, and the production of „a wealth of detailed information about a much smaller number of people and cases‟ (Patton, 2002, p 14)

However, there are some weaknesses of qualitative research Among them are a bad distinction between facts and interpretation, a low repeatability of research approach, the impossibility of precisely describing results in advance, the explicit acknowledgement of the researcher‟s subjectivity, and a reduction in generalizability, and so on (McMillan &

In short, qualitative approach has been chosen as the main approach for the present study for the two reasons: firstly, qualitative research approaches are mainly used to analyze linguistic data (McMillan & Schumacher, 1993); secondly, qualitative analyses by applying House‟s model in this study will be supplemented by quantitative analyses, thus, the above weaknesses of qualitative research will be reduced

Quantitative research is the label for „numerical research‟ (Brown & Rodgers, 2002, p

15) In quantitative research the researcher tests a theory by means of „a conceptual model‟

(McMillan & Schumacher, 1993, p 74) In qualitative research, data appear as words, while in quantitative research data appear as numbers (McMillan & Schumacher, ibid)

The common methods of gathering quantitative information include questionnaires, standardized interviews, tests, standardized observations, and so on (Yamashita, 1996, p

The potential weaknesses of quantitative research include great attention paid to the technical details of the research, in general, and to measuring techniques and procedures, in particular; too much respect to numerical data, which are produced intentionally but interpreted as objective phenomena (McMillan & Schumacher, 1993; Jonker & Pennink,

In this study, qualitative analyses by means of House‟s (1997) model are combined with quantitative analyses Concerning the quantitative analyses, we adapted House‟s (2006b) methods in her research on English-German translations In House‟s (2006b) research, she uses both qualitative analyses (by means of her model, 1997) and quantitative analyses The corpora in her research consist of three parts: the Primary Corpus, the Parallel Corpus, and the Validation Corpus, i.e three data sets (original, translation, and comparative monolingual texts) The quantitative analyses in House‟s research (2006b) serve: (i) to verify the results of the qualitative analyses with regard to the development of the frequency of occurrence of certain linguistic means, and (ii) to reveal preferred usage of each individual form with respect to collocations and co- occurrence as well as their syntactic and textual position in relation to the organization of information

The present study includes only two sets of data (original and translation), and it uses the quantitative analyses to verify the results of the qualitative analyses with regard to the frequency of occurrence of three linguistic means in both the STs and TTs: (i) the use of Vietnamese personal pronouns and addressing words as translations of English personal pronouns, (ii) passives vs active sentences, and (iii) nouns (in STs) being replaced by verbs (in TTs)

In short, this study employs mixed research approaches: qualitative and quantitative

Qualitative analyses by means of House‟s (1997) TQA model, the main method, are then supplemented by quantitative analyses of a number of linguistic elements, revealed in the TTs In other words, qualitative findings will be presented in combination with quantitative data, and mixed approaches undertaken in the present study are common for research (Patton, 2002)

In House‟s model (qualitative analyses), the ST and the TT are analyzed along the dimensions of register - Field, Tenor and Mode - by lexical, syntactic and textual means

The first specific method employed in the present study was descriptive analysis The research then employed contrasting and comparing methods to discover commonalities, differences and similarities between the STs and TTs In House‟s evaluation scheme, the

TT profile is compared to the ST profile and a statement of mismatches and errors is produced, and the TT is categorized according to dimensions of register and genre

Contrasting and comparing methods were also applied in the quantitative analyses to investigate the frequency of occurrence of three linguistic features in the STs and TTs, namely personal pronouns, active and passive constructions, and sentences with noun and verb structures

The next method was interpretive, as qualitative data analysis is „often heavy on interpretation‟ (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007) The analysis and comparison of STs and TTs in this study includes the researcher‟s interpretive comments and explanations

Also, in the quantitative data analysis, interpretation was used to analyze data from survey questionnaires, with information often being compiled into data tables for convenient reference

As discussed earlier in this section, the present study used mixed approaches (qualitative and quantitative) and some specific methods Qualitative analyses by means of House‟s

(1997) TQA model are followed by quantitative analyses with a method adapted from House (2006b) In addition, Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task (MDTC), and focus group interview were also employed to measure the target reader‟s response to the naturalness of a number of sentences in the TTs

In what follows, detail of the qualitative and quantitative analytical procedure, MDCT tool, and focus group interview will be provided

The operation of House‟s (1997) functional-pragmatic model is as follows:

- A text profile is produced of the ST register on the basis of analytical findings on lexical, syntactic and textual levels along the dimensions Field, Tenor, and Mode

- A description of the ST genre realized by the register

- A statement of function: This includes the ideational & interpersonal component of that function

2 The target text (TT) The steps of analyzing the TT are the same as those for the ST

3 Comparison between ST and TT

FINDINGS FROM QUALITATIVE ANALYSES AND DISCUSSIONS

The five original texts and their translation texts will be analyzed in this section by means of House‟s (1997) model in the following order: (i) „Southern Skies‟ – „Trời Nam lồng lộng‟; (ii) „Abbreviation‟ – „Tên viết tắt‟; (iii) „Joe‟ – „Thằng Joe‟; (iv) „The Hottest Night of the Century‟ – „Đêm nóng nhất thế kỷ‟; and (v) „Hostages‟ – „Con tin‟

Firstly, the ST is analyzed along the dimensions Field, Tenor, and Mode Secondly, the

TT will be analyzed in the same manner, and the two resulting textual profiles will be compared for their relative matching Thirdly, the TT is categorized into an overt or a covert translation In the presentation of the results of the analysis of TT, we will, however, restrict ourselves to listing the mismatches on various dimensions Thus, if no mismatches are mentioned on any one dimension, it is to be assumed that TT is satisfactory on that dimension

To balance the length of this chapter with that of other chapters, detailed analyses of STs No 2, No 3, No 4, and No 5 will be put in Appendix D Thus, from Section 3.2 to Section 3.5, the analysis of STs will include only the main content of each story

3.1 ‘Southern Skies’ (ST No.1) – ‘Trời Nam lồng lộng’ (TT No.1)

3.1.1 Analysis of ST No.1 „Southern Skies‟

“Southern Skies” is a 16-page-long story told by a boy, recalling his childhood from the time he was about 6 or 7 until he was about 17 or 18, his relationship with his parents, with his parents‟ friend - a professor, and his schoolmates His relationship with the professor is the focus of the story His parents immigrated to Australia from Czech Republic, where they had qualifications in medicine and law But in Australia they were able to find jobs only in a shop or a can factory The family lives in Brisbane, Queensland

On the whole, the boy‟s life, characterized with behavior and feelings typical for teenagers, is peaceful, except for some incidents

Lexical items to describe the boy‟s parents‟ nostalgia for the home country (Czech Republic): Pils (a Czech brand drinks) (19, 30) 3 , the good offices of the Infant of Prague

(55), the Old Country (throughout the story)

Phrases to describe the boy‟s relationship with his parents and the Professor, especially, to convey the boy‟s stubborn behavior at his early teenage: my broad accent, my slang, my feet toughened and splayed from going barefoot, spoiled and willful, and so on

Lexical items to describe the boy‟s growing up into adolescence at the age of 15 and 16: staring for long hours into mirrors behind locked doors, good looking, already tall and well-made, obsessed with myself, and so on

Lexical items to describe the boy‟s activities with his schoolmates after school: lounged and swapped stories, heard gossip, told jokes, played show-poker, smoked, and so on

Words and phrases to describe tropical plants in Queensland: dark tropical plants, monsters, hibiscus, banana-palms with their big purplish flowers, glossily pendulous on stalks, bark, elkhom, tree orchids, showers of delicate maidenhair, and so on

Both long and short clauses: simple and complex structures

Theme – dynamics: both marked and unmarked themes

In most parts of the ST, the themes are unmarked However, there are cases of marked theme: (i) Fronted theme: Fronting of time and place adjuncts: e.g (1) From the beginning he was a stumbling block, the Professor (180-1) One night, in our warm late winter, I was riding home past the Professor's house when I saw him hunched as usual beside his telescope,… etc; Fronting of object or complement: (3-4) Squat, powerful, with a good deal of black hair on his wrists, he was what was called a `ladies man' -…; (ii) Predicated theme: it-structure (cleft-structure): e.g (32-3) It was the Professor who recognised the nature of my errand, etc.; (iii) Identifying theme: Wh-structure (pseudo-cleft structure);

(5-6) What he practised now was a formal courtliness, a clicking of heels and kissing of plump fingers…, and so on

3 The number in the brackets refers to the page number in the ST and the TT

There are several sentences with parallel structures, e.g (18-9) „Here, pass the Professor this slice of Torte,' my mother would say, choosing the largest piece and piling it with cream… (44-5) …my shoes were properly polished, my nails clean, my hair combed, my tie straight, my socks pulled up…

Author‟s Temporal, Geographical and Social Provenance

The language in the original is contemporary, standard English

Author‟s Personal (Emotional and Intellectual) Stance

The author retells about his childhood with a sense of nostalgia, empathy, humor and involvement

The author keeps the academic title „Professor‟ with uppercase letter throughout the story, although giving no name of this academic, to show special respect to this character Other characters: his schoolmates, his mother‟s friend and her husband (Mary and John) are just given first names

The author uses the phrases „half-boy, half-bike‟ (136) to describe himself, a teenager boy whose hobby is riding a bike

The phrases „half-boy, half-bike‟ are repeated twice in the text (136, 174) for humorous effect

Author- reader: symmetric relationship The author tells about the experiences in his childhood, there is no evidence of educational motivation; no „talking down‟; no hidden, ideologically induced lecturing

The author shows special respect to the professor, a main character, by leaving this title with an uppercase letter throughout the text For other characters (his schoolmates, his mother‟s friend and her husband), the author just uses the first names

The relationship among characters is characterized with tolerance and sympathy

The boy‟s mother and father show their tolerance to his disobedience or roughness

The boy also shows tolerance and sympathy to the professor when he is abused by him

The academic title Professor is capitalized throughout the text to show respect

Characters‟ first names are used, e.g Ross Mc Dowell, Jimmy Larwood, Helen, Mary and John Perhaps, by using their first names, the author wants to show his intimate relationship with these characters

Presence of rhetorical, addressee-directing utterances to create involvement: e.g

(168-9) „I could have taken us both to 6, 8, 10, but what then?‟; (306-8) What is it, I asked myself, that I will remember and want to preserve, when in years to come I think of the Past? What will be important enough? and so on

The story is told in a chronic order: it begins from the time the boy remembers his first encounter with the professor and ends with a negative experience that the boy has with the professor when he is about to leave school

Neutral level and informal style level: both narration and conversation Syntactic Means:

Types of clauses: both coordination and subordination; more subordination than coordination

Coordination: (13-4, 14-6, 50-1, etc); e.g (13-4) For our parents there was deep sorrow in all this, and the Professor offered hope

Subordination: (1-3, 5-8, 10-3, 23-6, 30-2, etc); e.g (3-5) Squat, powerful, with a good deal of black hair on his wrists, he was what was called a „ladies man' - though that must have been far in the past and in another country

Types of noun phrases: complex noun phrases

- Pre-modification: types of pre-modification: (i) adjectives: e.g (1) a stumbling block, etc.; (ii) nouns: e.g (4) a „ladies man‟, (12) „factory hands‟ , etc

- Post-modification: types of post-modification: (i) prepositional phrases: e.g (11) qualifications in medicine, (28) his only companion on those breathless flights, etc.;

FINDINGS FROM QUANTITATIVE ANALYSES & ANALYSES OF

The qualitative analyses of the five STs and TTs in Chapter 4 show the mismatches along the dimension of Tenor including (i) the use of various Vietnamese personal pronouns, kinship nouns and job or academic titles as translations of the six English personal pronouns in the STs; (ii) the transformation of several English passive sentences into actives in the TTs; and (iii) the shifting of several nouns in the STs to verbs in the TTs

In order to verify the results of qualitative analyses of the five original texts and their covert translations, in the first section of this chapter, quantitative analyses of personal pronouns, and of passive vs active sentences will be provided The second section discusses quantitative analyses of nouns vs verbs, and analyses of the naturalness of sentences with verbs in the TTs being translated from those with nouns in the STs

4.1 Quantitative analyses of personal pronouns, and of passive vs active sentences

In this section, quantitative analyses of frequency of occurrence of linguistic features, as detected from the qualitative analyses in Chapter 3, are divided into two parts: (i) different ways of translating English personal pronouns in the TTs; and (ii) the translation of passive sentences in the STs into Vietnamese in the TTs

In what follows, I will summarize the translation of English personal pronouns in the STs into Vietnamese in the TTs as presented in Chapter 3 - Qualitative analyses of the STs and TTs

It is necessary to know that the number of English personal pronouns is seven (Quirk

& Greenbaum, 1973), while that number of Vietnamese ones is twenty (Diệp Quang Ban

& Hoàng Văn Thung, 1991; Nguyễn Thiện Giáp, 2004) The two concepts important for the analysis in this section include Vietnamese addressing words and personal pronouns

The Vietnamese addressing words comprise the first and the second personal pronouns, kinship nouns, job titles and job positions, (Phạm Thành, 1994; Trần Ngọc Thêm, 1998;

Cao Xuân Hạo, 2001; Nguyễn Thị Trung Thành, 2007) Also, there may be over sixty addressing words in Vietnamese (Trần Ngọc Thêm, 1996/2006) For a summary of the above linguistic works, see Appendix C

In the five STs, 6 English personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, we and they) have been used to refer to the characters, while the TTs employ 34 words, including 9 personal pronouns (tôi, tao, mày, tớ, nó, chúng tôi, mình/ tụi mình, họ, chúng), 13 kinship nouns (cháu, bác, mẹ, con, chị, em, cậu, chú, cha, bố, ông, bà, cô), 5 noun phrases (with the head noun being a kinship word) (bà ấy, bà ta, cô ấy, cô ta, ông ta), 2 academic/job titles (giáo sư, thầy), 4 common nouns (con bé, bên nhà em, nhà nó, cả gia đình), and 1 proper noun, i.e person‟s name: Shirley (see Appendix F)

In this section, the translation of the pair „I – you‟ in the TTs will be analysed The choice of this pair of English personal pronouns in Vietnamese stems from the previous findings that in Vietnamese language a great number of kinship nouns are used as addressing words (Trần Ngọc Thêm, 1998), and that the first person and second person personal pronouns are addressing words in communication, whereas the third person personal pronouns are not (Nguyễn Thiện Giáp, 2004) There are 17 pairs of translation of the pair „I-you‟ detected in the five TTs, among which 5 pairs have been repeated (see Appendix F), thus, the total number of the translations is 12 pairs with 15 Vietnamese personal pronouns and addressing words (see Table 4.1 below)

Table 4 1: Frequency of occurrence of Vietnamese personal pronouns and kinship nouns as translations of the pair „I-You‟ 15

Personal pronouns & addressing words Frequency of occurrence

15 The AntConc software was used to count the frequency of Vietnamese personal pronouns and kinship nouns as translation for the pair „I – You‟

As can be seen in Table 4.1, among the fifteen translations of the pair „I – you‟, there are 4 personal pronouns („tôi‟, „tao‟, „tớ‟, and „mày‟), and the rest are kinship nouns used as addressing words The words that most frequently occur in the translations are not the personal pronouns, but the two kinship nouns „cậu‟ and „con‟, which occur 44 and 43 times respectively The two pronouns „tôi‟ and „tớ‟ occur just around half of those two kinship nouns, 24 and 21 times respectively The other two pronouns „mày‟ and „tao‟ have been used much less frequently, 8 and 4 times The frequency of occurrence of the remaining addressing words ranges from 24 to 1, and the three kinship nouns „bố‟, „cô‟ and „bà‟ do not occur in the translations of the pair „I - you‟, but their use is hidden in the conversations The reason is that the communication roles of „I – you‟ in the STs interpreted in Vietnamese as between a father and his child, between an auntie and her niece, and between a grandmother and her grandchild, but their conversations are short and only one interlocutor addresses the other one without referring to oneself (see Appendix F - Table 9, when the boy named Vic addresses his grandmother) Compared with research by Nguyễn Quang (1996), the TTs have used 11/34 pairs of kinship nouns which are equivalent to the English pair „I‟ – „you

The frequency of occurrence of Vietnamese personal pronouns and kinship nouns as the translations of the pair „I –you‟ can be expressed in Figure 4.1

Figure 4.1 Frequency of occurrence of Vietnamese personal pronouns and kinship nouns as translations of the pair „I-You‟

The use of Vietnamese kinship nouns instead of personal pronouns in the TTs corresponds to the Vietnamese communicative preferences as shown in research (Nguyễn Văn Chiến, 1993; Phạm Thành, 1994; Trần Ngọc Thêm, 1998; Cao Xuân Hạo, 2001;

Nguyễn Thiện Giáp, 2004; Hữu Đạt, 2009) Vietnamese people tend to have a well- defined communication role when starting a conversation: who they are, what relations they have towards the other interlocutors (Phạm Thành, 1994; Nguyễn Thiện Giáp, 2010)

A person may have a higher social status than other ones, which affects the way they address each other A person‟s communication role is determined by his/ her status compared with other interlocutors according to two systems: family and society In the family system, communication roles are governed by a strict hierarchy, i.e roles are decided by a generation order, such as grandparents – grandchildren, parents – children, etc, or by diachronic order (NB: thứ tự trước sau) of the same generation (e.g older siblings – younger siblings) In the family system, „no value is given to such factors as age, social status, and occupation‟ (Phạm Thành, 1994, p 73) In the society system, the communication role is identified in a way completely different from that of the family system Here the role is determined by characteristics of the communication situation

Three types of communication situation are: (i) formal communication (with compulsory rules such as in the army, at school, at church, etc.); (ii) informal communication (i.e daily life communication in streets and in public places such as theatres, theme parks, etc.; and (iii) semi-formal communication, which carries features of both formal and informal communications, i.e either free communication or communication with compulsory rules in places such as offices, factories, and so on (Phạm Thành, 1994, p 73)

In addition, Vietnamese personal pronouns, except for „họ‟ (third person plural personal pronoun), “are perceived as not showing respect and cannot be used in daily life communication with people outside the family” (Cao Xuân Hạo, 2001, p 297) Thus, to express one‟s respect or politeness toward other interlocutors, Vietnamese people do use a great number of kinship nouns as addressing words in their communication The use of kinship nouns also helps interlocutors to identify their communication roles more easily, i.e the same interlocutor may have different communication roles depending on the situation (formal, informal, or semi-formal) Therefore, one English personal pronoun can be given different versions of translation in one TT For example, „I‟ in „Hostages‟ has five communication roles: a narrator, a daughter, a pupil, a music teacher, and a mother; and six versions of translation have been provided: „tôi‟, „con‟, „cháu‟, „cô‟, „mẹ‟, „tao‟ In the role of a narrator, the use of first person singular personal pronoun „tôi‟ with a neutral sense is appropriate In the role of a daughter referring to herself in conversations with her mother the translator uses the kinship noun „con‟ (a child), while the mother addresses herself when talking to her daughter with the kinship noun „mẹ‟ (mother/mum) In the role of a pupil referring to herself in conversations with the music female teacher, the noun

„cháu‟ (niece) is used, and the female teacher uses the noun „cô‟ (auntie) In this case, the kinship nouns such as „cháu‟ and „cô‟ lose their original meanings as used in family communication, but have an extended meaning: „cô‟, an addressing word used by a woman who regards herself as somebody‟s auntie (Hoàng Phê, 1994, p 195), and „cháu‟

(an addressing word used to refer to oneself in conversations with a woman to show respect (Hoàng Phê, 1994, p 129) In the communication role of „a mother‟, „I‟ has been translated as „mẹ‟ (meaning „mother or mum‟) in her normal communication with her daughter, and „tao‟, first person singular personal pronoun with a sense of disrespect (Hoàng Phê, 1994, p 859), when the mother was angry with her daughter‟s behavior

What is more, kinship nouns are used as addressing words not only as translations of the pair „I – you‟, but also as translations of other English personal pronouns in the TTs, i.e „he‟, „she‟, „we‟, and „they‟ The translation of the third person singular personal pronoun „he‟ includes a personal pronoun „nó‟; three kinship nouns: „ông‟, „bố‟, „chú‟; and two academic titles: „ông giáo sư‟, „thầy‟ (giáo) (see Table F.3, Appendix F)

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

Major findings

This study was set out to answer the following questions:

(i) What are some of the Vietnamese culture-specific linguistic features that make Vietnamese translations of Australian short stories target-text focused?

(ii) At what levels in House‟s model are the Vietnamese translation texts and the original Australian short story texts equivalent?

In the following section, I will summarize the major findings in answering those questions

Research question 1: What are some of the Vietnamese culture-specific linguistic features that make Vietnamese translations of Australian short stories target-text focused?

The findings of this study first from qualitative analyses, then validated by quantitative analyses and analyses of translation naturalness, have shown the mismatches between the STs and TTs along the dimension of Tenor in the following three points: a) The use of both Vietnamese personal pronouns and kinship nouns, in particular, with a greater frequency of kinship nouns, for the same English personal pronouns:

6 English personal pronouns („I‟, „you‟, „we‟, „he‟, „she‟, and „they‟) in the STs have been rendered into 34 words, including 9 Vietnamese personal pronouns („tôi‟, „tao‟,

„tớ‟, „mày‟, „nó‟, „chúng tôi‟, „mình/ tụi mình‟, „chúng‟, „họ‟), 13 kinship nouns (cháu, bác, mẹ, con, chị, em, cậu, chú, cha, bố, ông, bà, cô), 5 noun phrases (with the head noun being a kinship word) (bà ấy, bà ta, cô ấy, cô ta, ông ta), 2 academic/job titles

(giáo sư, thầy), 4 common nouns (con bé, bên nhà em, nhà nó, cả gia đình), and 1 proper noun, i.e person‟s name In addition, 12 pairs with 15 Vietnamese personal pronouns and kinship nouns are employed as the translations of the pair of English personal pronouns „I – you‟

It is obvious that the way of translating English personal pronouns into Vietnamese in the TTs reflects Vietnamese culture in using both personal pronouns and kinship nouns, even with a greater prevalence of kinship nouns, in communication In addition, the use of personal pronouns and kinship nouns depends on the communication role and situation, as well as the communication relations that one is involved in (Nguyễn Văn Chiến, 1993; Phạm Thành, 1994; Nguyễn Quang, 1996; Trần Ngọc Thêm, 1998;

Cao Xuân Hạo, 2001; Nguyễn Thiện Giáp, 2004; Hữu Đạt, 2009) b) Active vs passive constructions:

The qualitative analyses have shown that several passive sentences in the STs have been transformed into active ones in the TTs In order to investigate this mismatch, in the quantitative analyses, first all the passive sentences in the STs and their translations in the TTs were taken and put in a list, then analyzed to see the proportion of actives – passives transformation and the type of English passives more likely to be rendered into actives in Vietnamese Altogether 79 passive sentences were detected in the STs, among which 49 sentences (62%) were transformed into actives, and 30 sentences (38%) still kept the passive constructions The results show that a much larger proportion of the pseudo-passive and semi-passive sentences in the STs are transformed into active sentences in Vietnamese than the central passives, (80%, 80% and 52.9% respectively)

The transformation of 62% of passive sentences in the STs into active ones in the TTs is a convincing evidence to confirm the preference of active constructions to passives in Vietnamese (Nguyễn Kim Thản, 1977; Trần Ngọc Thêm, 1998) c) Word class shifting from nouns (STs) to verbs (TTs):

Thirty five sentences with nouns in the STs but rendered into those with verbs in the TTs have been detected In order to measure the receptor‟s response to the naturalness of these 35 sentences in Vietnamese, an MDCT, a survey questionnaire, was conducted The MDCT, consisting of 35 items, each with two options: one contains a verb as in the TTs and the other – a noun created by the researcher, was then delivered to five groups of native Vietnamese speakers, totaling 370 respondents, who were required to choose the option that sounds more natural in Vietnamese The MDCT was followed by a focus group interview, which was aimed to investigate the reasons behind the low choice of verbs (45% - 55%) in 11 sentences Among these 11 sentences, 4 sentences were chosen by all the five groups, and 7 sentences – by each individual group of respondents

The analyses of MDCT data in Chapter 4 show that 30 out of 35 sentences with verbs in the TTs, i.e 85.7%, were chosen as sounding more natural than those sentences with nouns by over 60% of native Vietnamese respondents The rest five (5) sentences with verbs have the choice rate between 46.5% and 56.8% In addition, the analyses of focus group interview data, which include eleven (11) sentences with a low verb choice (four sentences being chosen by all the five groups, and seven being chosen by individual groups of MDCT respondents), reveal that among the four sentences with verbs, the naturalness of which was chosen by under 52% of respondents of the five MDCT groups as a whole, one sentence with the verb and one sentence with the noun were indicated as sounding natural in Vietnamese, while for the other two sentences both verbs and nouns were considered by the focus group interviewees For the rest seven sentences, four sentences with verbs were selected as natural, whereas both verbs and nouns were mentioned when the naturalness of the other three sentences was discussed

Taking into account the findings from both the MDCT and the focus group interview, it can be said that over 85.7% of the sentences with verbs in the TTs have been chosen as sounding more natural in Vietnamese language than those with nouns

These findings have proved the culture-specific linguistic feature manifest in the TTs, which is the preference of verbs to nouns in Vietnamese language (Trần Ngọc Thêm,

In a nut shell, the above three mismatches may be interpreted as reflecting the differences in English and Vietnamese communicative preferences and norms, established in cross-cultural research These Vietnamese communicative preferences and norms, which are culture–specific and linguistically manifest, have confirmed the previous findings on Vietnamese communicative culture

It follows that all the five TTs under investigation in this study have been found to be covert translations, in which a cultural filter has been applied One wonders, however, why the translator had not chosen overt translations, as House (2001a, p 144) suggests: literary works „…as products of a particular culture…would predispose the translator to opt for an overt translation‟ If the TTs were overt translations, (i.e the English personal pronouns in the STs were translated into personal pronouns of neutral nuance; several nouns in the STs were rendered as nouns in the TT; or the passive constructions were kept the same), the reader would have a chance to be exposed to a different world of language style, through which the ST‟s culture is manifested

Research question 2: At what levels in House’s TQA model are the Vietnamese translation texts and the original Australian short story texts equivalent?

The answer to question 2 involves two components of the individual textual function in House‟s model: ideational and interpersonal, and genre

The first component of the individual textual function, ideational metafunction, is concerned with „the speaker's experience of the real world‟ (Halliday, 1970, in Teich,

1999, p 15), while the second component, interpersonal metafunction, „serves to establish and maintain social relations‟ (Halliday, 1970, cited in Teich, Teich, 1999, p 15), including a speaker's assessment of the probability and relevance of a message And the two parameters of these two sub-components are field and tenor Field, the parameter of ideational metafunction, deals with what is going on in a situation, including subject matter, while tenor, the parameter of interpersonal metafunction, conveys interpersonal relations and the participants‟ roles

The qualitative analyses in this study have shown that there are some mismatches on field between the STs and TTs, including (i) nine sentences from the ST „Joe‟ being missing in the TT „Thằng Joe‟ perhaps because of being overlooked by the translator (see Chapter 2); (ii) the TTs being more explicit than STs with inserted explanations (TTs:

„Thằng Joe‟ and „Con tin‟); (iii) collective nouns used instead of specific brands of food and drinks (TT: „Trời Nam lồng lộng‟); (iv) words being added to the titles in three out of five TTs („Trời Nam lồng lộng‟, „Tên viết tắt‟, and „Thằng Joe‟), and some other minor errors in the lexical meanings of words In addition, in all the five TTs „and‟, the phrasal and clausal coordinator, is either not translated or replaced with a comma, and different ways of translating „and‟, such as in TT No 1 „Trời Nam lồng lộng‟ twelve versions of

„and‟, in TT No 2 „Tên viết tắt‟ eleven versions of „and‟ have been spotted Finally, loss of cohesion is found in some cases of translating kinship nouns in the ST into Vietnamese in the TT „Tên viết tắt‟

Contributions of the study

Firstly, the study has showed that House‟s model is highly applicable in assessing the translation quality of English-Vietnamese short stories, a type of fictional prose Applying House‟s model, the assessor is able to point out not only the merits, the shortcomings of the translations, but also the cultural aspects of the target text community, which are linguistically manifest It should be also noted that House‟s model, mainly used in evaluating translations from English into European languages, such as German, French and Spanish (House, 2001a, 2001b, 2006b), was first time applied into assessing translations of English-Vietnamese short stories

Secondly, this study helps to confirm the previous findings about Vietnamese culture- specific linguistic communicative preferences and norms, namely the use of a variety of kinship nouns as addressing words in communication, the preference of verbs and the preference of active constructions

Thirdly, in terms of research methods and tools, the contributions of the study lie in the use of quantitative analyses within House‟s TQA model, as well as the use of MDCT, as a pragmatic tool, and a focus group interview to measure the naturalness of translations based on the native reader‟s response The research findings from the qualitative analyses can be verified by quantitative analyses The three mismatches along the dimension of Tenor in this study are validated by quantitative analyses and analyses of the data from MDCT and the focus group interview The present study indicates that MDCTs can be used not only in pragmatics research of L2 or EFL, but also of L1 What is more, in this study, MDCT is somewhat similar to a practical test to obtain responses from the receptor of the translation, called „reactions to alternatives‟, suggested by Nida and Taber (1969/reprinted 1982, p 171) The application of MDCT in this study also bridges the gap between Nida and Table‟s suggestion and the real test It is also implied that other types of DCT, such as the written discourse completion tasks, oral discourse completion tasks, discourse role-play tasks, discourse self-assessment tasks, and role – play self- assessments, can be employed as research tools Moreover, the focus group interview conducted was aimed to gather the feedback from the respondents, and to enhance the quality of the data from MDCT Therefore, it can be said that mixed approaches (qualitative and quantitative), multiple specific methods, MDCT and the focus group interview have enabled the researcher to use the methods of data collection available rather than being restricted to the types of data collection normally associated with only one approach or method It is obvious that mixed approaches also help to answer the questions that cannot be answered by qualitative or quantitative approach alone.

Pedagogical implications

The dissertation offers a contribution to the teaching of English as a second language and a foreign language The findings of this study can help Vietnamese students learning English to understand more about the Vietnamese communicative preferences and cultural norms The outcomes of this study can be used to design activities to develop students‟ communicative competence of both English and Vietnamese languages The activities may involve a linguistic – cultural comparison between the original texts and the translation texts, or a distinction between source text focused and target text focused translations

The findings also suggest the ways to make a translation target-text focused, i.e trainee translators or professional translators should pay attention to cultural aspects of the target text community, if they want to produce covert translations The rich linguistic evidence about the planned mistranslation provided in the dissertation suggests that fictional prose translators have the right to be independent to some extent from the source text in order to reproduce it as a living work in the target culture In addition, translation strategies, such as explicitation and compensation, may also be considered in training translators

The qualitative analyses in this study have shown that House‟s (1997) model has the following shortcomings Firstly, there is an overlap in two sub-areas of Tenor: Social

Role Relationship: Syntactic Means, and Mode: Participation: Syntactic Means

Both these two sub-areas deal with direct address of reader to create involvement and intimacy Yet, it should be noted that „…there is overlap between all three variables, field, tenor and mode‟ (Hatim & Mason, 1990, p 51) Secondly,

„mismatch‟, a very important term in House‟s (1997) model, is not clearly defined

There is not a clear distinction between mismatches and errors, as well as an explicit definition of mismatches and differences In the model, mismatches may refer to translation errors In addition, „mismatches‟ in some cases are used interchangeably with „culture-conditioned differences‟ (House, 2001a, pp 153-

154) Furthermore, mismatches may also be caused by translation strategies, such as explicitation and compensation The examples of these strategies can be found in the translation of foreign food and beverage brands (see Section 3.1.2), and of the original story title and film character (see Section 3.2.2), and so on Therefore, it is less clear how House‟s model can interpret these strategies

Firstly, the application of House‟s (1997) model, in which the terms „mismatch‟ and

„error‟ are not clearly defined, to some extent limits the findings of the evaluation of short story translation quality The assessor needs not only to show that the translation text is a covert or overt translation, but also to indicate translation errors, if any, made by the translator

Secondly, this study focused on the evaluation of translation quality of English- Vietnamese short stories, thus, the research results cannot be generalized to the translation quality of other genres, such as commercial texts, sci-tech translations, or the other sub- genres of literature as poetry or drama, and so on

Firstly, the research methods and tool used in this study can be applied in other studies to assess the translation quality of non-literary genres, such as commercial texts, sci-tech texts, etc as well as to assess the quality of other components of literary genre, such as novels, poetry and drama

Secondly, other Vietnamese communicative preferences and norms, which are linguistically manifest, such as the use of particles „à, ư, nhỉ, nhé, and so on‟, different ways of saying „thank you‟ and „goodbye‟, and so on can be explored to confirm the findings on Vietnamese communicative culture by Vietnamese scholars Also, further research can be conducted on such communicative preferences as preference of verbs or preference of the actives in other sub-genres of literature, or in non-literary genres

Thirdly, there should be more research into the manifestation of interpersonal component of individual textual function in House‟s model, such as mood and modality, for the purpose of asserting the markedness of interpersonal function in Vietnamese literary texts

ARTICLES AND PROJECTS RELATED TO THE DISSERTATION

1 Phạm Thị Thủy (2009) Thử nghiệm phân tích đánh giá bản dịch một truyện ngắn theo mô hình của Newmark [Evaluation of the Translation Quality of a Short Story Using Newmark's Model] Tạp chí Ngôn ngữ và đời sống [Language and Life], số

2 Phạm Thị Thủy (2012) An Application of House‟s Functional-Pragmatic Model of Translation Assessment to Evaluating the Vietnamese Translation “Đêm nóng nhất thế kỷ” Journal of Foreign Language Studies – Hanoi University, 33 (December,

3 Phạm Thị Thủy (2013) House‟s Functional-Pragmatic Model of Translation Assessment and Implications for Evaluating English-Vietnamese Translation Quality VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, Vol 29, No 1 (2013), pp 56-64

4 Phạm Thị Thủy (2014) Phân tích cách dịch đại từ nhân xưng trong bản dịch truyện ngắn „Đêm nóng nhất thế kỷ‟ từ quan điểm ngữ dụng học [An Analysis of Ways of Translating English Personal Pronouns in the Vietnamese Translation of Australian Short Story „The Hottest Night of the Century‟ from Pragmatic Approaches] Tạp chí Khoa học Ngoại ngữ - Đại học Hà Nội [Journal of Foreign Language Studies – Hanoi University], 38/2014, trang 127-140

5 Phạm Thị Thủy (2014) Một số mô hình đánh giá phê bình dịch thuật và áp dụng vào phê bình bản dịch văn học Anh – Việt [Some Translation Quality Assessment Models and Their Applications to Evaluating the Quality of English – Vietnamese Fictional Prose Translations] Kỷ yếu Hội nghị Khoa học lần thứ 34 – ĐHNN- ĐHQGHN [Proceedings of Science Conference No 34 – ULIS-VNU], Hà Nội,

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Lu Vietnamese Translations of Some Selected Stories in "Australian Short Stories"

(MA thesis), University of Languages and International Studies, VNU

Dịch giả Trịnh Lữ: 'Sách nội rất hay' [Translator Trinh Lu: 'Domestic books are very interesting'] (2007) vnexpress.net

Diệp Quang Ban (2006) Ngữ pháp tiếng Việt [Grammar of Vietnamese] (2 ed Vol 2)

Hà Nội: NXB Giáo dục [Education Publishing House]

Diệp Quang Ban, & Hoàng Văn Thung (1991) Ngữ pháp tiếng Việt [Grammar of

Limitations of the study

Firstly, the application of House‟s (1997) model, in which the terms „mismatch‟ and

„error‟ are not clearly defined, to some extent limits the findings of the evaluation of short story translation quality The assessor needs not only to show that the translation text is a covert or overt translation, but also to indicate translation errors, if any, made by the translator

Secondly, this study focused on the evaluation of translation quality of English-Vietnamese short stories, thus, the research results cannot be generalized to the translation quality of other genres, such as commercial texts, sci-tech translations, or the other sub- genres of literature as poetry or drama, and so on.

Suggestions for further research