reflections on the application of noun phrases in english vietnamese translation

CAN THO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION May, 2007 Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu... Nguyen Anh Thi May, 2007 Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tậ

CAN THO UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

May, 2007

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STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY

I certify that this work has not been submitted in whole or in part to this university,

or to other educational institutions for marking and assessment either previously

or concurrently I also certify that I do this research by myself, and this is all my own original work

Nguyen Anh Thi

May, 2007

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to people for their sincere help that bring

me upon completion of my study

To my supervisor, Mr Huynh Trung Tin, I would like to express my deep gratitude to his useful advice and support At the beginning, he guided me to shape my research ideas, introduced helpful websites, suggested related books

to find appropriate literature review, and gave immediate feedback on my drafts Without his guidance, I could not complete my research paper in time

I am grateful to lecturers of the English Department, and the students of English Education class 01 and 02, course 31 of Can Tho University for their contribution

to the completion of data collecting process by doing the tests Without their willingness, my study would not make good progress

I would like to send my thankful messages to all of my old teachers at Cheguevara high school, Ms Nguyen Thi My Hanh, Ms Nguyen Ngoc Trinh, and

Mr Tran Van Hoang; all my classmates, for their support, and my foreign teacher, Mr Wesley Hedden, living in Ohio, the USA for his shared experience in doing research

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ABSTRACT

After acquiring a basic knowledge of English, the students could be able to analyze English materials During the process of using English, the term translation appears and plays a very essential role in learners In addition, English sentence structures are very complicated, and raise a lot of troubles for learners, especially in terms of noun phrases since they are considered as one of the two main parts of a sentence, and occur in different styles of discourse Therefore, this study is aimed at finding out the answer for the hypothesis if the knowledge of English noun phrases should be brought to learners in order that they could perform well in their translation

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Chapter 2: RESEARCH METHOD 24

2.1 Subject 24

2.2 Instruments 24

2.2.1 Comprehension test 24

2.2.2 Performance test 25

2.3 Test validity and reliability 25

2.3.1 Test validity 25 2.3.2 Test reliability 26

2.4 Procedures 28

2.5 Result analysis 28

Chapter 3: RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 30

3.1 Results 30 3.2 Result analysis and discussion 33

3.2.1 Group A 33

3.2.2 Group B 33

3.2.3 Group C 34

3.2.4 Group D 35

3.3 Summary 36 PART THREE: CONCLUSION 37

1 Summary 37 2 Implication 38

3 Suggestion for further research 38

BIBLIOGRAPHY 39

APPENDIX 41

COMPREHENSION TEST 41

PERFORMANCE TEST 45 SUGGESTED ANSWER KEY 48

ASSESSMENTS 50

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PART ONE INTRODUCTION

5 Background

Throughout 4 years studying at university, many students in the English Department have been fully equipped with the knowledge of linguistics such as semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology and theory of translation Thus, they have better understanding of language meaning and language uses, but they still meet many problems in translation that stem from the fact that English grammar structures raise many difficulties for those who learn English as a foreign language, especially English noun phrases

As can be said from Longman Dictionary of English language, and Culture (1992)

“a phrase is a group of words without a finite verb.” According to Noam Chomsky (1975), “a sentence is defined as a noun phrase and a verb phrase, and each sentence of the language is represented by a set of strings in which noun phrases are contained within verb phrases and verb phrases within noun phrases

in English.”, and “a sentence is formed by an noun phrase and a verb phrase.” Indeed, a sentence is usually considered the largest syntactical unit, and it consists of a noun phrase (or subject) and a verb phrase (or predicate) In other words, it could be said that noun phrases play a very important role in sentence structures

Indeed, noun phrases are used in different kinds of text such as in informal speech, newspapers, fictions, science writings and so forth Besides, the study proved that noun phrases also occur in different styles of discourse They are

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considered to play a very sensitive and core role in the text Because of this variety, noun phrases raise a lot of problems for the Vietnamese learners, especially when they translate materials from English into Vietnamese

6 Aim of the study

For the above-mentioned reasons, it is very necessary to conduct a research to see how the mastery of English noun phrases helps translators The study is aimed at finding out whether there is a correlation between the comprehension of English noun phrases and the translation performance In other words, the study

will try to answer the following research question: “Do English noun phrases

affect learners’ English-Vietnamese translation?”

7 Research methods

In order to find the answer for the research question, I design 2 tests to access both learners’ comprehension and performance of English noun phrases, basing

on the different types of noun phrases described in Chapter 1 Moreover, thanks

to the comprehension test, I can exactly measure the relationship between comprehension of English noun phrases and establish a correlation to decide on how much comprehension affects performance

All of the students majoring in English at the English Department – Course 31 – Can Tho University are invited to do the tests since they have already taken some courses of translation, English grammar including noun phrases

8 Organization of the study

There are 3 parts in this study: introduction, investigation and conclusion

PART 1: INTRODUCTION generalizes the background, aim, methods and the

organization of the study

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PART 2: INVESTIGATION

Chapter 1: Literature review

Chapter 2: Research methods

Chapter 3: Result analysis and discussion

PART 3: CONCLUSION summarizes the main points

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PART TWO INVESTIGATION

Chapter one: LITERATURE REVIEW

There are so many definitions of translation that I can find in some books and

websites, but I am really contented with these following ones by some sources

Firstly, Newmark defines translation as “a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message in one language by the same message in another language.”

Also, Pinhhuck (1997) states that “Translation is a process of finding a target language (TL) equivalent for a source language (SL) utterance.” Similarly, Catford (1965) maintains translation as a process which is always unidirectional, i.e from a SL into a TL

Nida and Taber (1969) explain the process of translating consisting of reproducing in the receptor language (RL) the closes natural equivalent of the SL message, first in terms of meaning and second in terms of style

According to Wills (1982), “Translation is a transfer process which aims at the transformation of a written SL text into an optimally equivalent TL text, and which

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requires the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic understanding and analytical processing of the SL.”

In addition, “Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning

of a text in one language – the ST – and the production, in another language, of

a new, equivalent text – the target text, or translation.” said from the website

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation Another definition of translation from

http://englishrussiantranslation.com/resources/glossary.html defines “Translation

is the process of facilitating written communication from one language to another

It is performed by a translator Translation should almost be done by a native speaker into his/her own mother tongue.”

In conclusion, translation is a very complicate process since the translators have

to deal with problems related to linguistic aspects of both the SL and the TL These definitions express the important textual and context equivalence in translation They affirm that equivalence must ensure the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic aspects of the SL

1.3 Translation process

As a matter of fact, each language conceptualizes in different ways Nida states

“in order to understand somewhat more fully the characteristics of different types

of translation, it is important to analyze in more details the principles that govern

a translation.” (1964) Also, it is understandable that a translation is understandably skewed when it cannot get the maximum equivalence between the SL and the RL Baker defines “a single word can sometimes be assigned different meaning in different languages” and “might be regarded as being more complex unit or morpheme”

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According to the website http://www.sil.org/translation/Trtheory.htm, translation is

a process based on the theory that it is possible to abstract the meaning of a text from its forms and reproduce that meaning with the very different forms of a second language Nida describes translation process by the following diagram

do not communicate is that they keep the SL skewing The skewing in the SL will not match the skewing in the RL.” He also defines skewing as “the diversity or the lack of one – to – one correlation between form and meaning” (1999) For instance, the English possessive noun phrase has a number of various functions

My brother → kinship

My singing → activity

In other words, the translators must first find out the meaning of the text to be translated and then re-express it in the form of the RL since each language packages meaning components in different ways, and as a result, skewing happens within that SL Similarly, Nida says “All types of translation involve loss

of information, and/or skewing of information.” (1975)

In addition, Newmark mentions “language has verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that refer naturally to persons, but may be transferred in some cases to objects” (1988:50) For instance, in phrases “the dog is intelligent”, “it is fighting”, the words “intelligent and fighting” are usually used for persons but in these examples, they talk about animal and thing However, skewing in Mark’s study (1988) is not as clear as Larson’s and the information of skewing in his study seems more practical

In brief, thanks to these above studies, we can assume that skewing often happens Consequently, the translators should be careful in analyzing the SL texts in order to avoid skewing

1.5 Equivalence

(From http://www.acurapid.com/Journal/14 equiv.htm)

Many theorists have studied equivalence in relation to the translation process, using different approaches, and have provided fruitful ideas for further study on this topic First of all, Vinay and Darbelnet view equivalence – oriented translation

as a procedure which “replicates the same situation as in the original, whilst using completely different working” They also suggest that if the procedure is applied during the translation process, it can maintain the stylistic impact of the

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SL text in the TL text According to them, equivalence is therefore the ideal method when the translator has to deal with proverbs, idioms, clichés, nominal or adjectival phrase and the onomatopoeia of animal sounds With regard to equivalent expressions between language pairs, Vinay and Darbelnet claim that they are acceptable as long as they are listed in a bilingual dictionary as “full equivalents” However, later they note that glossaries and collections of idiomatic expressions “can never be exhaustive” They conclude by saying that “the need for creating equivalences arises from the situation, and it is in the situation of the

SL text that translators have to look for a solution” Indeed, they argue that even

if the semantic equivalent of an expression in the SL text is quoted in a dictionary

or a glossary, it is not enough, and it does not guarantee a successful translation Meanwhile, an extremely interesting discussion of the notion of equivalence can

be found in Baker (1992) who seems to offer a more detailed list of conditions upon which the concept of equivalence can be defined She explores the notion

of equivalence at different levels, in relation to the translation process, including all different aspects of translation and hence putting together the linguistic and the communicative approach She distinguishes between:

• Equivalence at word level and above word level

• Grammatical equivalence

• Textual equivalence

• Pragmatic equivalence Similarly, Nida argues that there are two different types of equivalence, which in the second edition by Nida and Taber (1982) are referred to as formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence Formal correspondence - “focus attention on the message itself, in both form and content” is unlike dynamic

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equivalence which is based upon “the principle of equivalent effect” (1964) Formal correspondence consists of a TL item which represents the closet equivalence of a SL word or phrase Nida and Taber make it clear that there are not always formal equivalents between language pairs They therefore suggest that these formal equivalents should be used wherever possible if the translation aims at achieving formal rather than dynamic equivalence The use of formal equivalents might at times have serious implications in the target text since the translation will not be easily understood by the target audience (Fawcett, 1997) Nida and Taber state “Typically, formal correspondence distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the RL, and hence distorts the message, so as to cause the receptor to misunderstand or to labor unduly hard.”

Dynamic equivalence is defined as the way to put the sense of the original text into the best modern English, remaining close to the ideas expressed but not always following the exact wording or word order of the Hebrew or Greek originals Thus they may seem less “literal” than the formal correspondence translations, but can be just as “faithful” to the original text, and are therefore generally better suited for public proclamation or liturgical use They argue that

“Frequently, the form of the original text is changed; but as long as the change follows the rules of back transformation in the SL, of contextual consistency in the transfer, and of transformation in the RL, the message is preserved and the translation is faithful.” (Nida and Taber, 1982) For these opinions above, one can easily see that Nida is in favor of the application of dynamic equivalence, as a more effective translation procedure Only in Nida and Taber’s edition is it clearly stated that “dynamic equivalence in translation is far more than mere correct communication of information.” Indeed, Nida is much more interested in the

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message of the text or, in other words, in its semantic quality He, therefore, strives to make sure that this message remains clear in the target text

In conclusion, the notion of equivalence is undoubtedly one of the most problematic and controversial areas in the field of translation theory This term has been analyzed, evaluated and extensively discussed from different points of view and has been approached from many different perspectives The difficulty, however, in defining equivalence seems to result in the impossibility of having a universal approach to this notion

1.6 Competence and performance

In fact, knowing a second language means knowing all information of that language This includes information about phonology (sound system), syntax (rules of ordering elements in a sentence), lexicon (vocabulary system), semantics (system of meaning) and pragmatics (how we use a language in

context) This knowledge is called competence In other words, competence is

the specification of the language knowledge, and it is used in order to perform grammatical sentences

Thus without competence of the language, performance is impossible According

to Noam Chomsky (1965) “translation theory is primarily concerned with an ideal bilingual reader-writer, who knows both languages perfectly and is unaffected by such theoretically irrelevant conditions such as memory limitations, shifts of attention or interest, in applying this knowledge in actual performance.” In his study, he states that competence and learners’ knowledge have a very close relation, and performance is defined as the actual use of the language in real situation It is clear that competence and performance are highly mentioned in the reciprocal action They have the correlation with each other

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Performance is the use of the internal grammar in perceiving and producing the language (Noam Chomsky, 1965) Performance can be influenced by several factors, so it fails to reflect exactly the learner’s competence However, although performance level does not fully reflect competence level, without the knowledge

of the language, the communicators cannot perform in real situation Thus, the language competence is very necessary According to Roger T Bell (1991), the basic problems that the translators may face are the following: the comprehension of the ST, the transference of meaning between the two languages and the assessment of the TL Thus, the competence or comprehension of the SL is one factor that affects the translation

1.7 Sentences

According to Noam Chomsky (1975), “a sentence is defined as an noun phrase and a verb phrase, and each sentence of the language is represented by a set of strings in which noun phrases are contained within verb phrases and verb phrases within noun phrases in English.”, and “a sentence is formed by an noun phrase and a verb phrase.” A sentence is usually considered the largest syntactical unit However, there are a lot of ideas which have been raised about sentence structures According to O’Grandy and Duvolsky (1993), a rule for sentence structures is that it may consist of a noun phrase and a verb phrase Huddleston (1975) defines sentences as “linear sequences of words”, or Halliday (1985) states “a sentence is a complex clause because a clause can make up the organization of a sentence.” Another definition of sentences is that “a sentence has an noun phrase and a verb phrase that together create a formal predication that is not dependent on anything.” (A Transformational Syntax – Baxter Hathaway – page 300) Although there are many different definitions

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about sentences, they share the same core constituents: an noun phrase and a verb phrase

1.8 Phrases

As can be said from the Longman Dictionary of English and Culture (1992) “a phrase is a group of words without a finite verb.” In addition, according to

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticterms/WhatIsAPhrase.htm, a phrase is a syntactic structure that consists of more than one word but lacks the

subject-predicate organization of a clause, or a phrase is a group of related words that does not include a subject and verb

(http://athena.english.vt.edu/~owl/wcip/phrases.htm) In general, there are four kinds of phrase in English including noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, and prepositional phrases According to Roderick (1995), every phrase, except preposotional phrases, can consist of only one single word and “the head

of a phrase is the word around which the phrase is organized.” Thus, the head is the most important constituent that is not allowed to be omitted in a phrase construction Indeed, if the head of a phrase is a noun, then it makes an noun phrase, and if the head of a phrase is a verb, it makes a verb phrase, and the same for other phrases In a sentence, these types of phrase must be grammatically related to each other and have their own functions It is clearly that

an noun phrase is one of the two main constituents of a sentence structure, as Paul Robert (1964) said in his study that “all sentences contain two main parts,

an noun phrase and a verb phrase”, or “a sentence is formed by an noun phrase

and a verb phrase” said Noam Chomsky (1975)

1.9 Noun phrases

1.9.1 Some definitions from different linguists

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In the study of Antonio (2004), an noun phrase is generally defined as a syntactic unit that includes a noun The formal definition of an noun phrase given below describes the most common components of an noun phrase

In his book “An outline of syntax”, Mr Nguyen Hoa Lac-lecturer in English states that an noun phrase is a group of words with a noun or pronoun as the main part

(the head) The noun phrase may consist of only one word as in this case “Tom

arrived yesterday” or it may be long and complex In grammatical theory, an noun phrase (appreviated noun phrase) is a phrase whose head is a noun or pronoun optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers

Fromkin et al (1990) considers “an noun phrase could be an article followed by a noun (the car,…) An noun phrase could also be made of a head and a

prepositional phrase as its modifier such as (a man in a uniform) A noun phrase could also contain an adjective phrase as the modifier of the head like (a very

large black dog)

According to Paul Robert (1964), “all sentences contain two main parts, an noun phrase and a verb phrase” In his view, he shows:

- An noun phrase could occur with only a noun and with or without an

antecedent (a man/men)

- An noun phrase could also be structured by “a determiner + an adjective”

as the modifier and certainly a noun as in the noun phrase (a big dog)

- An noun phrase with the morpheme “s” (John’s father)

- An noun phrase could be a noun follow by a relative clause as in (the boy

who borrowed the book did not return it)

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- A verb phrase could be a noun post modifier like (the boy catching the

fish ) or (the fish caught by the boy)

- A compound noun could also be considered as the noun phrase like (the

school principle ) or (a living-room sofa)

In addition, Randolph Quirk et al (1980) say “the functions of noun phrases, as subjects, objects, complements or appositive in English sentence structures are diverse” In his study, he says English noun phrases fall into two basic types which are simple noun phrases and complex noun phrases A simple noun phrase contains just the head noun with or without determiners (a book, the girl, men, women, etc.) and a complex noun phrase contains a head and other components regarded as modifiers like (a very interesting mind, the teacher of music’s room, etc.)

Also, in Roderick A.Jackcob’s viewpoint (1995), English sentences are organized

as two major constituents: an noun phrase and a verb phrase In the noun phrase structures with definite determiners, he sums up the formula:

“the quantifier + of + the determiner + the quantifier + a noun”

Several of those trees

All of Terry’s money None of his relatives

In the noun phrase structures with indefinite determiners

“the quantifier/indefinite article + noun + possessive pronoun”

A book

No money Several books of his

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Moreover, the structures with prepositional phrases as modifiers are also raised

in his study like “the girl in the beautiful dress”, and a noun with an embedded clause is also a type of noun phrases like “a book which was sent to Paris

yesterday” In addition, adjective phrases could also appear in noun phrases in

both pre and post-modifiers like “the very beautiful girl”

To sum up, although many researchers have their own way in analyzing sentences and noun phrase structures, they share the same view that Noam Chomsky (1975) stated “a sentence is defined as an noun phrase and a verb phrase, and each sentence of the language is represented by a set of things in which noun phrases are contained within verb phrases and verb phrases within noun phrases in English”

1.9.2 Types of noun phrase

In general, English noun phrases fall into two basic types, which are simple noun phrases and complex noun phrases

1.9.2.1 Simple noun phrases

A simple noun phrase contains just the head noun with or without determiners (a

book, a chicken, the girl, men, student, etc.)

1.9.2.2 Complex noun phrases

A complex noun phrase contains a head and other components regarded as

modifiers (a beautiful girl, the small office furniture)

- Complex noun phrases: Coordination

Coordinate noun phrases will be joined by a coordinate conjunction, usually “and”

or “or”, as in the example: My sister and her best friend will deliver the letter

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Such structures are relatively simple to deal with except for one problem,

ambiguity as in this example: Old men and women will be served first

1.9.3 Structures of noun phrases

The noun phrase functional formula is potentially composed of 3 parts:

- Central word: the head is a noun

- Premodification precedes the head

- Postmodification follows the head

That old car in the drive Det pre-mod HEAD post-mod

The formula thus abbreviates several possibilities:

1) Head 2) Premodifier(s) + head 3) Head + postmodifier(s) 4) Premodifier(s) + head + postmodifier(s)

They saw her

Mine are chartreuse

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1.9.3.2 Premodifiers

The range of premodifiers of noun is large, including nearly all of the parts of speech in at least some form Following are tables of basic possibilities There are 2 kinds of premodifiers They are simple premodifiers and complex premodifiers

[The wombats] escaped

[That vase] is valuable

[Her serve] is powerful

[Some survivors] remained

[Which lobster] do you want?

[Seven boxes] fell

[Second thoughts] entered our minds

[Metal plates] shielded the instruments

Only one difficult case in the table is the noun modifier in which a noun modifies

a head noun, as in metal plates

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Noun modifiers appear frequently when one speaks of a material out of which something is made This construction is usually called noun-noun compound or noun-noun combination and their semantic range is extensive; for example, railroad crossing, wire cutter, elevator operator, relativity theory, Sunday Newspaper, culture shock

Numeral + ordinal Article + ordinal

The two culprits Those metal plates Several other candidates One such oddity

A second chance

The general order among them is as follows:

Determiner + premodifier + head

a/ Determiners

• Pre-determiners: all, both, half, fractions, numeral…belong to noun

determiners (All the courageous women)

• Central determiners or identifiers: articles (a, the), demonstratives (this, that), possessives (my, his…)

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• Post-determiners: numeral/quantifiers More than one may occur in an noun phrase

There are only certain acceptable combinations:

™ Ordinal number + indefinite quantifier

the first few hours

™ Ordinal + cardinal

the second five days

™ Indefinite quantifier + cardinal numeral

several thousand people

b/ Adjectives appear after determiners: to amplify or describe the head noun, to highlight some quantities of the noun

a charming small round old brown French oaken writing desk

c/ Noun modifiers:

They occur between an adjective and a head noun They are used to modify a head noun

A beautiful country cottages

Noun modifier + head noun constructions often precede the formation of real

compound nouns as in life + story lifestory

d/ A special premodifier: an noun phrase in the genitive case

The noun phrase genitive substitutes for a possessive identifier (my, your…) The noun phrase genitive itself can be “deconstructed” as an noun phrase Moreover, genitive noun phrases and adjective phrases readily combine with other structures to create heavily premodified NPs as in the following examples

- [All my friends’ hobbies] are interesting (genitive noun phrase with internal quantifier and genetive pronoun)

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- [All my friends’ very old plates] were sold last month (three premodifiers: quantifier, genitive noun phrase with possessive premodifier, adjective phrase with intensifier)

- [Those very old counterfeiting plates] belonged to Capone (three premodifiers: demonstrative, adjective phrase with intensifier, verbal phrase)

Genitive noun phrases themselves contain an noun phrase When one structure contains another structure, we say that the second structure is embedded in the

first For example, Harry’s sister’s painting

• songs about rebellion

• clocks on the wall, books on the shelf

• walks with my mother

• arguments about abortion

• reasons for my hesitation

• source of concern/the source of conflict

1.9.3.3.2 Complex Postmodifiers

Much more common and complex are the various kinds of postmodifiers that follow a head noun

There are 3 kinds of complex postmodifier

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• Prepositional phrases, also adjective and adverb

• Relative clauses

• Non-finite clauses a/ Prepositional phrases

They are frequently post-modifiers in an noun phrase

The man after me

The man in the queue on the boat

Adjective post-modification

ƒ Adjective post modification is usually found with an indefinite pronoun as its head

something strange

ƒ It is found in long construction

a boy good at Maths

ƒ It is used predicatively only

students abroad

ƒ Adjectives are normally not after nouns, except in a few set phrases as in

blood royal; heir apparent; court martial; ten years old

Adverbs are more frequent postmodifiers

the morning after

They can be seen as reductions of prepositional phrases

the morning after the heavy drinking

b/ Relative clauses (who, whom, whose, which, that)

In relative clauses, relative pronouns occur as post modifiers

The man who came here yesterday works for the Toyota Company

The man whom I saw yesterday works for the Toyota Company

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The man whose car was stolen works for the Toyota Company

The car which was stolen yesterday owned by a worker at the Toyota

Company

The man that came here yesterday works for the Toyota Company

The relative clause involving comparison

She buys more clothes in a month than I buy in a year

The most expensive clothes that she can afford

c/ Non-finite clause: they function as postmodifiers of an noun phrase There are

3 kinds

• Infinitive clauses: The student (who should) to answer this question…

• Present participle clauses: The car (which is) coming down the road…

• Past participle clauses: The doctor (who is) expected to arrive at any

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Chapter two: RESEARCH METHOD

In this chapter, I will first present the subjects of the research and attempt to persuade for being the subjects of the research survey In order to collect the data, the research uses tests as useful instruments that play a very important part of the survey with validity and reliability In addition, the procedures of carrying out the tests will be mentioned Finally, the result analysis and synthesis will be discussed

2.1 Subject

Trung tâm Học liệu ĐH Cần Thơ@Tài liệu học tập và nghiên cứu