Investigating the translation strategies for english vietnamese non equivalence at word level in the media text

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* TRỊNH THỊ NGỌC HÂN INVESTIGATING THE TRANSLATION STRATEGIES FOR ENGLISH-VIETNAMESE NON-EQUIVALENCE AT WORD LEVEL IN THE MEDIA TEXT (Giải pháp cho vấn đề bất tương đương dịch thuật Anh - Việt cấp độ từ vựng văn truyền thông) MINOR MASTER THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS CODE: 8220201.01 Hanoi, 2019 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ********************* TRỊNH THỊ NGỌC HÂN INVESTIGATING THE TRANSLATION STRATEGIES FOR ENGLISH-VIETNAMESE NON-EQUIVALENCE AT WORD LEVEL IN THE MEDIA TEXT (Giải pháp cho vấn đề bất tương đương dịch thuật Anh - Việt cấp độ từ vựng văn truyền thông) MINOR MASTER THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS CODE: 8220201.01 SUPERVISOR: Assoc Prof Dr Le Hung Tien Hanoi, 2019 DECLARATION I, Trinh Thi Ngoc Han, hereby declare that the work in this thesis is the result of my own research It is recognized that should this declaration be found to be false, disciplinary actions could be taken and penalties could be imposed in accordance with university policies and rules Hanoi, April 2019 Trịnh Thị Ngọc Hân i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Le Hung Tien, who inspired me to conduct this research and spent his time giving me invaluable suggestions, corrections and improvement, without which I would have been, no doubt, unable to finish the thesis I also send my gratitude to my family, who have always been supporting me during the completion of this study I also give sincere thanks to my friends and colleagues for their great support and encouragement Without the help of those people, this study has not been completed ii ABSTRACT This paper aims at highlighting the fact that „non-equivalence' represent a concept worth revisiting and dealing with when tackling the translation process of media text At which, many problems of translation at word level arises Some experts have proposed strategies to deal with these problems, among whom, Baker (1992, 2011 2018) is a prominent author in this expertise The purpose of this present study is, then, to reveal the strategies used in English-Vietnamese translation of media text accordingly with Baker‟s (2018) theory The Vietnamese translated data were collected from an official and copyrighted news agency of Vietnam namely Bnews (Vietnam News Agency) The source language data were collected from Reuter The findings sought to reveal how Vietnamese media text professional translators employed the strategies to deal with the problems of non-equivalence in English-Vietnamese translations The results of the study contribute to an understanding of contemporary strategies dealing with non-equivalence in translation Practical suggestions for translators and further research were also proposed Keywords: non-equivalence, media text, target language, source language, translation strategies iii TABLES OF CONTENT DECLARATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii TABLES OF CONTENT iv ABBREVIATIONS vi TABLES OF FIGURES vii TABLES OF APPENDIXES vii Chapter I INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale 1.2 Aims and Objectives of the Study 1.3 Scope of the Study 1.4 The Significance of the Study 1.5 Organization of the Thesis Chapter II REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 2.1 Definition of translation 2.2 Equivalence in Translation 2.3 Non-equivalence in Translation 2.3.1 Non-equivalence at word level 10 2.3.2 Strategies in Non-equivalence at Word Level 14 2.4 Review of Previous Study 16 Chapter III METHODOLOGY 20 3.1 The data 20 3.2 Method 21 3.2 Research Design 21 3.3 Analytical Framework 22 Chapter IV FINDING AND DISCUSSION 26 iv 4.1 The major problems of English-Vietnamese non-equivalence at word level 26 4.1.1 Culture-specific concepts 26 4.1.2 The source-language is not lexicalized in the target language 27 4.1.3 The source-language word is semantically complex 28 4.1.4 The source language makes different distinction in meaning 28 4.1.5 The target language lacks a superordinate 28 4.1.6 The target-language lacks a specific term 29 4.1.7 Differences in physical or interpersonal perspective 29 4.1.8 Differences in expressive meanings 29 4.1.9 Diferences in form 30 4.1.10 The problem of differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms 30 4.1.11 The use of loan words in English source text 31 4.2 Strategies to deal with non-equivalence problems in the translation of media text 33 4.2.1 Translation by a more general word or a superordinate 33 4.2.2 Translation by a more neutral/less expressive word 35 4.2.3 Translation by cultural substitution 37 4.2.4 Translation using a loan word or a loan word plus explanation 39 4.2.5 Translation by paraphrase using a related word 41 4.2.6 Translation by paraphrase using an unrelated word 42 4.2.7 Translation by omission 44 Chapter V CONCLUSION 47 5.1 Summary 48 5.2 Implications 50 5.3 Limitations and further research 51 References 52 v ABBREVIATIONS SL Source Language TL Target Language TE Translation Equivalence RQ Research question TT Target text vi TABLES OF FIGURES Figure 1: The density of problems of non-equivalence in English and Vietnamese media text 31 Figure 2: The frequency of strategies for dealing with the problem of nonequivalence in English-Vietnamese translation 45 TABLES OF APPENDIXES Appendix II Appendix VII Appendix XIV Appendix XXV Appendix XXXI vii Chapter I INTRODUCTION This chapter presents the background of the study, aims and objectives of the study, scope of the study, significance and the outline of the report 1.1 Rationale Along with the tremendous development of science and technology, media texts have been enriched and soon became a big corpus in diverse fields, which is an infinite source of information This in turn has resulted in an urgent need of translation to bridge the communication gap and make changes, in which, as Zeldin (1995, p 465) says „I see the meeting of people, bodies, thoughts, emotions, or actions as the start of change Each link created by a meeting is like a filament, which, if they were all visible, would make the world look as though it is covered with gossamer.‟ Even though communication is the primary aim and function of a translated text, Venuti (2012, p 11) states that today „we are far from thinking that translating is a simple communicative act‟ and that „a translation never communicates in an untroubled fashion because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences of the source by reducing them and supplying another set of differences drawn from the receiving situation to enable the translation to circulate there.‟ The troubles arise in the process of translation between two different written languages, which involves the changing of an original written text (the source text or ST) in the original verbal language (the source language or SL) into a written text (the target text or TT) in a different verbal language (the target language or TL) If translating were of only the transmission of these ... 2.2 Equivalence in Translation 2.3 Non- equivalence in Translation 2.3.1 Non- equivalence at word level 10 2.3.2 Strategies in Non- equivalence at Word Level 14 2.4... reviews the extant literature of translation, translation equivalence and non- equivalence, the strategies to deal with non- equivalence at word level and it also presents related studies so far in the. .. equivalents and the central task of translation theory is therefore that of defining the nature and conditions of translation equivalence. ‟ In contrast to Catford‟s (1965) formal-textual equivalence,