A study on common errors in vietnamese english translation of labels and photo captions in tourist attractions in ho chi minh city, vietnam

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY - A STUDY ON COMMON ERRORS IN VIETNAMESE - ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF LABELS AND CAPTIONS IN TOURIST ATTRACTIONS IN HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM Submitted to the Faculty of English Language in partial fulfilment of the Master’s degree in English language Course code: 1641900007 By LUONG KIM HOANG Supervised by NGUYEN THI NHU NGOC, Ph.D HO CHI MINH CITY, June 2018 i CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY I certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled: A Study on Common Errors in Vietnamese – English Translation of Labels and Photo Captions in Tourist Attractions in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam In terms of the statement of requirements for theses in Master’s programs issued by the Higher Degree Committee of Faculty of English Linguistics, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology Ho Chi Minh City, June 2018 Lương Kim Hoàng ii RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, Luong Kim Hoang, being a candidate for the degree of Master of Arts (English Linguistics), accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my Master’s Thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Librarian for the care, loan, and reproduction for theses Ho Chi Minh City, June 17th, 2018 Signature:……………………… Lương Kim Hoàng iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Nguyen Thi Nhu Ngoc for her great support, constant guidance, and continuous encouragement through the whole research process Her prompt, insightful advice was a light which led me to solutions whenever I was in dilemma I am so admired and grateful for her professional knowledge and guidance which have been a great value for me in the process of doing my research I am also thankful for Dr Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu’s huge devotion, suggestion and assistance throughout my thesis process She is a devoted dean and a professional lecturer who always occupies a certain respect in my heart In addition, I would like to send my sincere thanks to the management and all the staff of the War Remnants Museum, Fito Museum, the Reunification Palace, and the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City for their great support in my research data collection Besides, my special gratitude is intended for one expert in translation industry and professional editors working for Foreign Science Journal, University of Foreign Language in Hanoi and Translation Journal in Australia who helped me increase the validity and reliability for my research The ones can be missed out of my thankful list are the lecturers, Hutech President together with all the school staff who have created a very friendly and favorable environment for my study Last but not least, my sincere and warm thanks are for my family and friends who have supported me and been my companions during a long journey of doing my research iv ABSTRACT Museums are fascinating, important tourist attractions which not only conserve and display historical, scientific, or artistic objects but also satisfy visitors’ demand of leisure, education and research However, international visitors may get confused with the low quality of translation since a lot of errors are found in museum texts The thesis investigated common Vietnamese-English translation errors in photo captions and labels at three most international tourist-attracted museums and one historical gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 450 photo captions and labels were randomly collected from the museums, and processed into a bilingual Vietnamese and English parallel corpus Based on some popular models in translation, linguistic errors, currently used in the world, a hybrid erorr-analysis model was developed and applied to classfify the data in the corpus into 16 error types affiliated to major error categories The findings revealed that 96.6% of the corpus was found erroneous; and the most common errors were grammar, punctuation, usage, spelling, omission, addition, word choice, mistranslation, text type and inconsistency Then, some recommendations were provided for translation of photo captions and labels in the hope to provide a useful reference for translation training as well as improve the translation quality for tourism texts in Vietnam v TABLE OF CONTENTS CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY i RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ABSTRACT .iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v LIST OF TABLES vii LIST OF FIGURES viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .1 1.1 Background to the study 1.2 Problem statement 1.3 Purpose of the study .3 1.4 Research questions and Hypothesis 1.5 Scope of the study 1.6 Significance of the study 1.7 Definition of key terms 1.8 Organization of the study .5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Museums as favorite tourist attractions 2.2 Labels and captions in museums and their language features 2.2.1 Labels and captions as main types of museum texts 2.2.2 Language features of museum labels and captions 11 2.2.2.1 Language features of exhibit labels 11 2.2.2.2 Language features of photo captions .16 2.3 Translation and its function in museum communication 20 2.3.1 Translation 20 2.3.2 Translation functions in museum communication 21 2.4 Translation errors and error analysis 22 2.4.1 Translation errors 22 2.4.2 Error analysis 24 2.5 Models of error analysis in translation 25 2.5.1 Error analysis procedure 25 2.5.2 Models of error taxonomy .28 2.6 A review on previous studies in translation errors of tourism texts 35 2.7 The conceptual framework for the thesis 36 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 38 vi 3.1 Research design 38 3.2 Research site 38 3.3 Samples and sampling procedure 40 3.4 Research instruments 43 3.5 Data collection procedure 45 3.6 Data analysis procedure .45 3.7 Validity and reliability .46 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 48 4.1 The statistics of common translation errors .48 4.2 The analysis of error categories and types 50 4.2.1 Syntactic errors 50 4.2.2 Semantic errors 56 4.2.3 Pragmatic errors 62 4.2.4 Translation-specific errors 65 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 69 5.1 Major findings 69 5.2 Implications and recommendations 70 5.3 Limitations and suggestions of further research 72 REFERENCES 75 APPENDICES 84 Appendix A: The Bilingual Vietnamese - English Text of the Thesis 84 Appendix B: The Translation Error Report by a Professional Translation Editor 146 Appendix C: Explanation of Error Categories by ATA (2017) 161 Appendix D: Definitions of Error Categories in the Developed Model in the Thesis by the thesis author 167 Appendix E: The Thesis Author’s Article Publication Certificate 171 Appendix F: The Plagiarism Check Report of the thesis 173 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 The Error Categories proposed by LIZA in 200 28 Table 2.2 The Error Categories of Liao (2010) 30 Table 2.3 The Hybrid Model of Error Types by Dastjerdi & Abdolmaleki (2012) 32 Table 2.4 The Model of Translation Error Categorization adapted from that of Dastjerdi & Abdolmaleki (2012) 33 Table 3.1 The Table for determining sample size from a give population by Morgan and Krejcie (1970, p 607) 41 Table 3.2 Samples collected from the four research sites 43 Table 3.3 The Bilingual Vietnamese-English Text Corpus 43 Table 4.1 The Error Types and Their Frequency 48 Table 4.2 The Frequency of Semantic Errors 56 viii LIST OF FIGURES Fig 2.1 The Error Analysis Procedures adapted from Pinker (1986)’s 27 Fig 2.2 The Conceptual Framework for the thesis 36 Fig 4.1 The Frequency of All the Errors in the Corpus 49 Fig 4.2 The Frequency of Syntactic Errors 50 Fig 4.3 The Frequency of Pragmatic Errors 62 Fig 4.4 The Frequency of Translation-specific Errors 65 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS ATA American Translation Association CNN Cable News Network EFL English as Foreign Language ESL English as Second Language GDP Gross Domestic Products ICOM International Council of Museums ID Identification LIZA Localization Industry Standards Association NAATI National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters NSW New South Wales TFAO Tradition Fine Arts Organization TWA Tourism Western Australia USA United Nations of America effects can be counted as Addition errors However clarification due to constraints imposed by English is permissible Omission (S2) Both textual information and the author’s intention in Vietnamese are left out of English Implicitation is acceptable Implicitation is defined as “A translation procedure intended to increase the economy of the target text and achieved by not explicitly rendering elements of information from the source text in the target text when they are evident from the context or the described situation and can be readily inferred by the speakers of the target language.” (Translation Terminology, p 145) as cited in ATA (2017)’s Error Categories Explanation Terminology or The selection of a content word or phrase (verb, noun, word choice modifiers) with inaccurate or unsuitable meaning in (S3) English version can be counted as terminology error The error type occurs when an inappropriate term to a particular subject field is used in English to covey its corresponding one in Vietnamese Also, terms which are used in different technical industries but employed in more general texts can be recognized as terminology error Too freely The transfer of meaning and intent of Vietnamese texts translated (S4) cannot be done appropriately and that leads to this error type If creative translation alters the meaning, error will be counted The rewriting and restructuring cause changes in the meaning or intent of the Vietnamese texts, error will be marked 168 Too literal or The word-for-word translation of Vietnamese texts which word-for-word leads to embarrassing, unidiomatic, and inaccurate translation (S5) rendering can be marked as this error type False cognate This error occurs when words of similar sounds and (S6) meaning but dissimilar of etymologies are confused in English 10 Ambiguity (S7) This error occurs when the English translated texts allow more than one semantic meaning but their Vietnamese counterparts not 11 Spelling (S8) The spelling of a word is incorrect in accordance with English conventions The violation of the uses of capitalization and accents and other diacritical marks can be marked as the spelling error Also, the incorrect use of letter case which is referred as a capitalization error is marked as the spelling error Letter case is the difference between letters which are bigger (upper case) or smaller (lower case) 12 Misunderstandin This error occurs when translators misread a word or g of the original chunks of words in Vietnamese texts and that causes the text (P1) inappropriate and incorrect translation of it/them in English texts 13 Mistranslation The error occurs when the meaning transfer of (P2) Vietnamese to English changes or distorts the content of Vietnamese texts 14 Text type (P3) “A text type error occurs when some component of the translation fails to meet specifications listed or implied in the Translation Instructions (Style Guide) This category 169 includes Register ("when the language level or degree of formality is not appropriate for the target audience or medium specified in the translation Instructions") and Style ("when the style [e.g., tone, method of exposition] of the translation is inappropriate for publication or professional use as specified by the Translation instructions") ATA (2017) 15 16 Incomplete This error includes missing titles, headings, and passage (T1) sentences in a paragraph or a passage Inconsistency This error is also known as cohesion error which “occurs (T2) when a text is hard to follow because of inconsistent use of terminology, misuse of pronouns, inappropriate conjunctions, or other structural errors” ATA (2017) 170 APPENDIX E THE ARTICLE PUBLICATION CERTIFICATE 171 CERTIFICATE OF PUBLICATION THIS CERTIFICATE HAS BEEN AWARDED TO: NGUYỄN THỊ NHƯ NGỌC, LƯƠNG KIM HOÀNG IN RECOGNITION OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE PAPER ENTITLED COMMON VIETNAMESE – ENGLISH TRANSLATION ERRORS IN PHOTO CAPTIONS: A CASE STUDY AT THE WAR REMNANTS MUSEUM IN HO CHI MINH CITY IN THE TRANSLATION JOURNAL IN JULY 2018 ISSN – 1536 – 7207 Link to the Article: http://www.translationjournal.net/July-2018/common- vietnamese-english-translation-errors-in-photo-captions-a-case-study-atthe-war-remnants-museum-in-ho-chi-minh-city-vietnam.html APPENDIX F THE PLAGIARISM CHECK REPORT OF THE THESIS Document Viewer     Turnitin Originality Report Processed on: 14-Jul-2018 11:08 WIB ID: 982409766 Word Count: 22590 Submitted: Thesis By Luong Kim Hoang Similarity Index 11% Similarity by Source Internet Sources: 10% Publications: 4% Student Papers: 4% refresh 1% match (Internet from 13-Feb-2018) http://jfl.iaun.ac.ir 1% match (Internet from 06-Jun-2014) http://ijnet.org 1% match (Internet from 16-Nov-2017) 173 http://www.ccsenet.org