NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITYFACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGESENGLISH FOR BUSINESS DEPARTMENTA STUDY ON THE DIFFICULTIES THAT BUSINESS ENGLISH STUDENTS FACE WHEN TRANSLATING MARKETING MATERIA
What should be done to overcome these difficulties?
The study will be conducted with students majoring in Business English of two intakes: 58 and 59 This is based on the level of their awareness of the difficulties, because students with different exposure to marketing terms and edvertising slogans have different perspectives.
In details, the study consists of 3 weeks examining related papers and other reliable sources, 3 week conducting in-depth interviews, 3 week on questionairs including two quick tests and 7 weeks processing the papers.
5 Methodology 5.1 Method of collecting data s* Data collection techniques
In the study, in-depth interviews and survey questionnaire are carried out to find out what the difficulties that students encounter. s* In-depth interview
Students majoring in Business English of Intake 58 and 59 are directly interviewed Their answers are received then to provide data and information for the paper The purpose of interview is to find out whether students are aware of their difficulties and in case students recognize the difficulties, do they have motivation to improve their translation skills.
The students are given questionnaire with logical questions related to research topic to collect data The questionaire is published under the digital Google form to be convenient for students. s* Data analysys techniquesIn the study, qualitative data analysis is used to elaborate students’ difficulties.
INTRODUCTION OF THE ORGANIZATION WITH
The study’s core problem revolves around students’ difficulties in translating Marketing terms and Advertising slogans in Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University.
Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University was established in 2003 For almost two decades, the faculty has been providing teaching and training program to students majoring in Business English Unlike other colleges and universities in Vietnam such as Hanoi University, Vietnam National University or Hanoi University of Technology, Faculty of Foreign Languages design their undergraduate courses to equip students with expertise and knowledge that later enable them to launch a career in Business and Economics.
Accordingly, students are expected to use English with a high level of proficiency in both verbal and both verbal and non verbal communication.
The 5 core pillars of Business English undergraduate program at National Economics University is English skills, English used in Business, Translation and Interpretation, Fundamentals of Business Administration, Linguistic theory and Second languages (Chinese or French).
For Translation & Intepretation, students must complete academic translation courses in their third and fourth year as part of the curriculum requirement.
Along with selected materials that students receive from lecturers, they also have to create their own Portfolio in which they find, choose and translate documents by themselves.
One feature of requisite materials that Faculty of Foreign Languages include in their translation courses is that the materials span all areas with the focus on Business This means that students are exposed to documents in Commerce &
Trade, Economics, Information Technology, Journalism, and Marketing.
In-depth interviews show that a great number of students have great difficulties in translating Marketing materials, especially Marketing terms and slogans.
Translating Marketing terms and slogans requires students to equip themselves with background knowledge and understanding about the field such the field, just like any other fields What makes it different is that, to produce a high-quality translation work, students do not necessarily align with precision like what they have to when translating STEM or Finance or Economics documents, but rather, they have to be flexible enough to convey a good marketing effect on readers while sustaining the original meaning of source language This leaves much room for English proficiency and students’ creativity to come up with good translation that exert the leverage that companies want to do over readers, who now can be called Customers After all, marketing contents are created to serve companies’s intentions.
This makes the translation work challenging yet also alluring to students, as they confess in interviews.
However, as analyzed above, translating Marketing terms and slogans poses a lot of difficulties for students While marketing terms and advertising slogans are in one field, they have distinct chacteristics that require different translation approaches from students This is the main source of inspiration for this research, which is aimed at identifying and elaborating Business English students’ difficulties in translating marketing terms and slogans so that they can improve their translation work’s quality.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Marketing terminologies There are various terminologies in the marketing field Below are some
Integrated marketing communications (IMC): the use of marketing strategies to optimize the communication of a message of the company's brands to stakeholders (Kitchen & Burgmann 2015)
Public relations (PR): the practice of deliberately managing the discharge and spread of information among individuals or organizations (such as company, government, or a nonprofit organization) and the public.
Marketing mix: set of marketing tools that the firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target market (Kotler, 2000)
Product: A product refers to an item that satisfies the consumer's needs or wants Products may be tangible (goods) or intangible (services, ideas or experiences).
Pricing Strategy: a model that is used to set the best price for a product or service.
Place: the process of distributing products from producers to the customers.
Promotion: Promotion refers to marketing communications.
Search engine optimization: the process of elevating the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
Channel management: a process where the company develops various marketing techniques together with sales strategies to reach as many customers as possible.
Influencer: acelebrity who has gained or raised their reputation on the Internet, most notably via social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and other platforms such as Youtube They attract followers by sharing curated contents from their daily lives Influencers do not only possess the power to make a direct influence on the purchase decisions of a large audience, yet their followers consider their sharing to be very trusting sources of information (De Veirman, M., V Cauberghe, and L.
Hudders, 2017) Therefore, companies may recruit Internet influencers to promote their products or services to their fans due to this high level of credibility.
Affiliate marketing: a kind of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. o Customer Relationship Management: an approach to managing a company's relationship with their customers.
An advertising slogan is a short and catchy phrase or word series applied to embed the name of a company, product or brand on consumers’ minds.
Companies create slogans to use in numerous marketing efforts with an aim to leaving a long-lasting impression on people's minds “By doing this, every time a consumer needs a product or service provided by a wide rage of companies, consumer will opt for the product or service which is top-of-mind from slogan recognition.” (Newton, C., 2020).
Advertising slogans are different from typical texts in that typical texts have simple structure and do not contain many concepts and details Meanwhile, slogans are aimed to convey specific contents Companies may brainstorma lot or invest a huge sum of money on agancies to come up with informative and easy-to-recall advertising slogans In terms of contents, advertising slogans usually boast/ emphasize a state-of-the-art product or service, such as the vegetable is the most organic and healthy in Vietnam, the high-end cosmetics is best for customers with high income, the functional urban area offers the freshest space for living in Vietnam, etc The slogans should meet at least two of the following criteria: (1) be succint and easy to remember, (2) highlight the cutting edge of a product, or its unique selling point (USP), (3) demontrate the product’s capability to satisfy the audience’s needs, (4) exhibit its addition benefits for their potential customers (Abdia, S., & Irandoustb, A., 2013) Examples of
Vietnamese advertising slogans are: Kết nói giá trị — khơi dậy tiém năng(Mobifone), Nang niu bàn chân Việt (Biti's), Cuộc sống đích thực (VNPT)
ANALYSIS AND FINDING
Lack of exposure to the terms
Eighty nine percent of surveyed students attribute their difficulties in translating marketing terms to their lack of prior encounter with the words.
One possible justification for this situation is that marketingis a fast growing field As more platforms of communication become available and more business models are created, the number of Marketing terms also rises.
For example, in the past, the most popular words in marketing were sales, television advertising However, over the past decases, marketing glossary has expanded to a great extent In 1991, Integrated Marketing Communications started to attract to Marketing professionals In 2000s, we witnessed the rapid development of viral marketing and viral advertising which was motivated by the interconnections of the Internet and mobiles Since 2003 when social networks such as MySpace and Linkedin started to emerge and gained massive public attention, there are even more Marketing terms that translators need to remember and understand such as digital marketing, influencer marketing.
This brings students numerous difficulties in catching up with the newly created marketing terms; accordingly, they become confused when confronting such
However, all of the Marketing terms that appear in the survey are, in fact, extremely commonplace Because in in-depth interviews, 11 out of 20 seniors claimed that they had working experience in content marketing (refer to Question 4), they must have also encountered such terms like SEO (Search Engine Optmization), KPI (Key Performance Index) In addition, Marketing terms related to Marketing Mix are extremely popular, yet the way a great proportion of students translate them somehow shows that students barely pay attention to the terms For instance, when translating English word “Place” into Vietnamese, more than 10 students translate it into “nơi chốn” and “phân đoạn”, while it is supposed to be “Phân phối”.
On the one hand, lack of knowledge about certain marketing terms despite working in content marketing shows that students do not make the connections between Vietnamese and English versions Therefore, these students cannot recall the words instantly when translating them On the other hand, the rest of the students with no work experience in content marketing translate the marketing terms inaccurately simply because of they do not pay particular attention to marketing.
Limited Vietnamese equivalent vocabulary
Interestingly, these are not students with working experience in content marketing Therefore, there are high chances that students cannot translate simply they are acquainted with English Marketing terms so they feel it is not an important thing to grasp the contents in Vietnamese, or in another scenario, they do not get exposed much to Marketing theories and materials that are written in Vietnamese.
One student have difficulty in translate Marketing terms because he/ she was baffled as to whether to keep the term or change it This can be explained by the facts that many English words do not have equivalents in Vietnamese, and numerous English Marketing acronyms are kept unchanged because translating may cause more confusion.
Below are some excerpts from articles featured on BrandsVietnam, a accredited journal in Marketing They prove that for many Marketing terms, there is no need to translate into Vietnamese.
UX và SEO ngày càng trở nên khan khít khi có thé tương hỗ lẫn nhau Nhiệm vụ chính của SEOer hiện nay không chỉ là phụ trách từ khóa mà phải ngày càng gia tăng trải nghiệm người dùng Điều này giúp từ khóa bền vững và giúp doanh nghiệp tối ưu hóa chuyển đổi.
Dé có thé đánh giá website có đạt được thành công hay không, ngoài việc bạn phải nắm rõ được các KPI quan trọng trong Google Analytics,thì bạn cần phải biết rõ được mục tiêu KPI trên trang web của mình Hiện tại, điều gì bạn muốn đạt được nhất trên website?
Figure 6 Excerpts from articles featured on BrandsVietnam 3.3 Students’ difficulties in translating Advertising slogans
Preservation of original meaning 0/ togeth 46 (46%)
Figure 7 Four greatest obstacles that students face when translating
Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English
Students’ difficulties in translating Advertising slogans originate from vocabulary, grammar, the demand for preservation of original meaning together with its marketing effect on readers, and “other” which they specify as “keeping the translation smooth” and “keeping the translation short”
Vocabulary To 60 percent of students who have difficulties in translating Vietnamese slogans
Students’ translation work in the survey reveals more thorough insights into this vocabulary problem.
(1) VIETTEL: Hãy nói theo cách của bạn
Du lịch Vietnam: Vẻ đẹp bất tận (3) Mobifone: Kết nối giá trị - khơi dậy tiềm năng
(4) Kids plaza: An toàn cho bé, gia rẻ cho me.
VINGROUP: Noi tinh hoa hội tụ cùng phat triển
(7) VTV go: Mọi nơi, mọi lúc, mọi TV.
Sao Thái Dương: “Sao Thái Dương — Hạnh phúc đến mọi nhà”
(9) SABECO: VỊ bia của hàng triệu người sành bia
Hòa Phát: Hòa hợp cùng phát triên
Most students can successfully translate simple slogans such as Viettel’s slogan and Vietnam Travel’s slogan to English However, when confronting slogans which require more advanced vocabulary such as Vingroup’s, they immediately make mistakes Instead of using the words “the elite” or “quinfessence” to translate “tinh hoa”, they use the noun phrase “the best people” This reduces the translation quality significantly Or in translating Hoa Phat’s slogan, some students translate the word “cung’’ into “together” and place the word after
“development” Not only does this sound word-by-word but it also breaks down the structure of the original source for no purpose.
Refering to Communicative translation method, students have to make the target text reader-centered and effect-oriented Thus, using incorrect and less-than-catchy words to translate Advertising slogans fails to adapt to this creterion.
Apart from advanced words, the top two vocabulary obstacles that students face when translating are acronyms and terminologies.
The majority of students have difficulty translating acronyms, as presented in the bar chart below. nam ee ip NHữữmeag multipl
Figure 8 Common vocabulary barriers that you face when translating
Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English
The use of accronym is a quite new linguistics phenomenon This phenomenon originates from the characteristics of a modern world where businesses are developing at an accelerating rate and communication is keep to be as instant as possible, as a consequence.
Acronyms may play a very small part in the field of lexicography, yet they cause great problems for translators, especially students who have little experience in translation Besides, with the rapid growth of technology and communication channels, in particular cellular telephony and the internet, the number of acronyms such as CRM, AR, KPI, CTR is on the rise.
While KPI and SEO may be familiar acronyms to students, CRM and CTR are relatively difficult to guess if the students do not have a background knowledge about the field If students are equipped with some basic Marketing knowledge, they will be more likely to figure out what the acronyms stand for within seconds.
Terminologies are the second vocabulary obstacles for students when translating Advertising slogans However, as terminologies usually do not appear in Vietnamese slogans, this is more of a difficulty when translating Marketing terms which has been analyzed above.
Thirty four students have problems with polisemies Based on their Vietnamese-English translation with Advertising slogans which shows that they no difficulty understanding Vietnamse polisemies, it is likely that the polisemies that students struggle with are English According to research, around 10% of
Vietnamese words have more than one meaning Meanwhile, in English, the rate is up to 40%.
To analyze why students encounter this difficulty, let us look at an English Advertising slogan.
"Have You Met Life Today?" — Advertising slogan of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 2001
In this example, it is not difficult for translators to recognize the meaning of the word Life here because they can easily associate the polysemy with the company’s name.
Usually, polisemies causes difficulties for translators without contexts.
Meanwhile, when given slogans to translate, students often know the companies who owns the slogans Therefore, the reason why students find it hard to translate may be that they do not pay attention to the company.
Consider another example of polysemy in Advertising.
“Take it from manufacturer Wool It's worth more Naturally.” (American Wool Council, 1980)
This is an unusually long slogan It contains “naturally” which is a pun (a joke that makes a play on words words with more than one meaning) The slogan ran above an image of a sheeep From here, translators may realize that “naturally” refers to wool in the nature, not the textile industry.
Here, students may have difficulty if they do not take the image as a hint to figure out the meaning of the polysemy.
Overall, students’ difficulty translating polysemies may arise from two main reasons: e@ They fail to make a connection with company’s information e They miss the context where the slogan is placed The context here can be an image, a social event, a time in history It is easier to translate when the image is the hint; nonetheless, when the context is something else that requires background knowledge, students will find it extremely difficult to translate.
3.3.2 Preservation of original meaning together with its marketing effect on readers
The nature of Advertising slogans, combined with the characteristics of Communicative Translation, requires that students translate in a flexible way so that the slogans sound natural and smoother while still being succint Another important requirement is that students must make sure that the message that the slogans contain reach the readers — customers as well as possible.
In order to do meet those standards, students must have an excellent command of English In details, students need to have solid grammar knowledge which allows them to alter the structure of the orginal slogans to make it clearer or shorter.
Moreover, having a wide vocabulary and creativity in expression also facilitates students to preserve the meaning while making the slogans more attractive to the readers.
The number of surveyed students attribute their difficulties to this reason is 46%, pointing out that approximately half of students fail to translate Advertising slogans effectively because either they lack the necessary English proficiency or they have expression problems which prevent them from modifying the target text to achieve the best marketing effect.
Figure 9 Common grammar barriers that students face when translating
Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to EnglishIn terms of grammar, most students find it challanging to translate noun phrases and verb phrases.
One reason for their dificulty is that they want to meet the criteria of slogans which is succint and easy to remember while translating all the noun phrases and verb phrases would make slogans long.
However, it is important to note that in English, many companies still use noun phrases and verb phrases in their slogans.
Let us look at an English slogan by Goldfish company called “The snack that smiles back”.
The slogan contains three parts of a English noun phrase as follows:
The + snack + that smiles back
Pre-modification head noun post-modification
This proves that English, as the target language, accepts the source language shift in translation with the same structure as the target language text In other words, students can translate the whole noun or verb phrases if they are not too long.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Keeping a Marketing dictionary
The lexis of a language grows at an estimated rate of 500 words every year This could create difficulties for a student who is not abreast of the vocabulary expansion, partly because it takes a while before the terms find their way into dictionaries.
To improve translation skills with Marketing terms, one good method is that students keep a marketing dictionary with them This can be a book published by professionals or notebooks which students create by themselves.
The marketing dictionary is an extremely valuable to refer to because they contain updated terms used in the industry Terms may have different meanings,and as discussed before, new terms are added continuously Therefore, it is important to stay updated with the vocabulary.
When creating the dictionary, or read the books, students should take a approach to Marketing terms by addressing the following questions: e@ What is the term? e What does it mean? e@ Why does it matter to marketing translators? e Are there similar terms that translators also should know? e Are there relevant examples that help in understanding the term?
One important feature of Marketing acronyms is that they are created by replaced initials This simple formation gives us popular acronyms such as KOL (Key Opinion Leader), KPI (Key Performance Index), SEO (search engine optimization),
If students understand this simple formation and get acquainted to them, they will have less trouble dealing with marketing term translation.
To translate Marketing terms correctly, it is necessary to understand what concepts that the terms convey and know their equivalents in Vietnamese and English This underlines the importance of having reliable Marketing sources which students can use as reference.
Some classic textbooks from which students can learn fundamental Marketing terms are “Marketing Management” written by Philip Kotler & Kevin Lane,
“Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management” by Philip Kotler & Alice Tybout, Fundamentals of Marketing
(original name: Marketing can ban) written by Professor Tran Minh Dao, National Economics University As regards Vietnam textbook, it features terminologies in both Vietnamese and English laguages on the very first pages and include definition and explaination in the later pages.
While English books provide students with basic knowledge about marketing terms, Vietnamese textbooks offer them the correct translation of the terms.
Indubitably, it is important to be well-grounded in the basics before catching up with the latest Marketing terms.
4.2 Recommendations for improving slogan translation from Vietnamese to English
4.2.1 Consulting dictionaries Being well-versed in grammar as well as sentence structure should be the first thing that students should have to counter problems of slogan translation.
The remaining obstacles can be addressed by consulting vital translation tools including hard-copy dictionaries, pocket books and online sites.
In details, to counter difficulties in translating acronyms, I would personally recommend that students refer to Acronym Finder
(http://www.acronymfinder.com) where they can find over 470,000 definitions.
In addition, since English is regarded as an international language, a simple way to deal with accronyms is to render the them as 'borrowed' words and add an explanation along if necessary For example, students may keep SEO and add its Vietnamese meaning along.
4.1.2 Developing the mindset of a Marketer
Once aiming to be a translators working in numerous fields, each Business English students should develop a versatile mindset in order to quickly recognize what the words refer to, since certain words are sometimes written as abbreviations which can be mistaken for other ones abbreviated in the same way, or polysemies with various meanings.
Students may not be able to make sense of unfamiliar words in the first time they confronting words By adopting the mindset of a marketers, they may be likely to make a guess by refering to factors surrounding the slogans such as images name of companies, marketing campaigns, or trends.
Having a good resource of vocabulary allows students to choose the best words to translate the slogans up to Communicative method’s criteria.
There are a variety of ways to expand lexis.
One popular tip is that students categorize words into separate topics In the case of collecting words used to translating Marketing slogans, students should pay attention to adjectives, verbs and nouns of superalative and strong forms, because slogans often boast the best feature of a product or service.
If possible, with every word, students illustrate them with pictures or examples.
Studies shows that visualization facilitates the process of memorization, including studying language Connecting the words with mindmaps is another effective method.
Students can also extend vocabulary by searching for words associated with the original word Apart from family words, students can see collocations, polysemies, synonyms and antonyms.
Students should spend time writing on a daily basis During the process, try to express an idea in different ways Once starting to write, keep a journal to keep track of improvements If students see that they have created powerful sentences that can be viral slogans, they may make a huge progress to become a good translator in Marketing field.
In addition, refer to books about writing such as Elements of Styles (William Strunk Jr) which provides express style in American English It is always necessary to build a solid writing background.
Because English expressions are unlimited, students need to hone their skills every day.
1 Summary of the major findings
Compared to junior students, senior students majoring in Business English are more aware of their difficulties in translating marketing terms and advertising slogans This is because they have more experience with translation practice and are about to enter the workforce.
As regards difficulties in translating marketing terms, the lack of knowledge in the field is the biggest difficulty that students majoring in Business English encounter when translate them Besides, students cannot translate English Marketing terms accurately because they do not know their Vietnamese equivalents Some students have problems with deciding whether to sustain the original terms or translate them into Vietnamese, especially when it comes to accronyms.
Interview questions (30 participants)
1 Are you interested in translating Marketing terms and slogans?
Groups of students Third-year students Final-year students
2a If you are aware of your difficulties in translating marketing terms and advertising slogans, do you have an intention to improve it?
; in each group Students’ responses
Third-year students 2 8 10 Final-year students 15 8 20
2b If the answer is yes, please give a reason. e 2 third-year students
I just simply like to do it 2/2 e 15 Final-year students
Terms are the fundamentals of Marketing
In recent years, digital marketing has been driving the growth of business 1/15
Numerous popular technology breakthroughs are in marketing
American tech giant relies on marketing to reach a global marketplace
Google recruits language manager every year 3/15
Facebook recruits market specialists for Vietnam market every year! think it is fun to translate Marketing terms
Marketing terms are easier than those in Physics, Chemistry, Finance 1/15 My parents urge me to go into marketing for job opportunities 2/15
3 What do you think you can do to improve your translation skills with marketing terms and advertising slogans?
Read professional newspapers and journals 10/30 Study the fundamentals of Marketing to understand its terms 9/30 I want space for discusstion along with Marketing supplementary materials 11/30
4 Do you have work experience in content marketing, digital marketing, or marketing in general?
I used to work as a content collaborator at helloVietnam.com, a local tour operator 15/30
I used to join a project by Google in Vietnam which focuses on digital training for SMEs.
Survey (100 participants)
1 Are you a junior/ third-year student or senior/ final-year student at
2 Of all the translation materials related to business and economics that you have been exposed to in translation courses at Faculty of ForeignLanguages at NEU, do you find Marketing materials particularly difficult to translate?
3 What is your biggest problem when translating a marketing term from
I have never heard about that marketingterm before 89%
I know the English term but do not know its Vietnamese equivalent 10%
I cannot decide whether to sustain theEnglish term or to translate it intoVietnamese 1%
4 If your answer is Other, please specify what it is.
5 Below are some marketing terms, please translate them into Vietnamese.
(3) Influencer (4) Integrated marketing communication (5) Channel management
(6) SEO (7) Public relations (8) Affiliate marketing (9) Customer relationship management (CRM) (10) Pricing Strategy
6 What are your greatest obstacles that you face when translating Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English? (You may choose more than 01 answers)
Preservation of original meaning together with its marketing effect on readers 46%
7 If your answer is Other, please kindly specify what the problem is.
8 What are the common vocabulary barriers that you face when translating Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English? (You may choose more than 01 answers)
9 What are the common grammar barriers that you face when translating Advertising slogans from English to Vietnamese?
10 Below are some advertising slogans by Vietnam companies Please translate them into English.
(1) VIETTEL: Hay noi theo cach cua ban
(2) Du lich Vietnam: Vé dep bat tan(3) Mobifone: Kết noi giá trị — khơi dậy tiềm năng.