Translation in economic field has been an attractive part for many researchers; business idiom translation, however, has not been addressed properly due to its complexity and inevitable challenges. Concerning business idiom translation, the thesis focuses on the study of students‟ capacity of recognizing business idioms, outstanding problems that the students encounter while translating business idioms then analysis will reveal the strategies that may be employed for better translations. The book “Speak business English like an American” by Amy Gillett is chosen as a major data collection for research reference. Concurrently, 30 responses for a survey prepared by the researcher will also provide valuable statistics and truth for finding out facts on different issues relating to students‟ business idiom translations. The result has shown that almost students claim that they can recognize business idioms when reading business news and magazines However, a small test points out their incapacity of perfectly recognizing all given idioms. Besides, their understanding of business idioms is still limited due to the major problems like the difficulties in equivalent expression, the lack of economic background knowledge and other problems in context and naturalness of specific idioms. Analysis also gives answer to the question on the most common strategy applied in business idiom translation – paraphrase. With different intentions of the translator, the translation will exploit different strategies which will be lately discussed in detail. Translating business idioms is now a popular task to all translators and economists as well. Therefore, being aware of economic knowledge and linguistic competence is of great importance in producing successful works of business idiom translation.
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION - - GRADUATION PAPER STUDENTS’ PROBLEMS IN ENGLISH – VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION OF BUSINESS IDIOMS IN THE BOOK “SPEAK BUSINESS ENGLISH LIKE AN AMERICAN” BY AMY GILLET Supervisor : Assoc.Prof.Nguyen Xuan Thom Student : Bui Hoang Dinh Course : QH 2009 HANOI-2013 ĐẠI HỌC QUỐC GIA HÀ NỘI TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ KHOA SƯ PHẠM TIẾNG ANH - - KHÓA LUẬN TỐT NGHIỆP KHÓ KHĂN CỦA SINH VIÊN KHI DỊCH ANH – VIỆT THÀNH NGỮ KINH TẾ TRONG QUYỂN SÁCH “NÓI TIẾNG ANH KINH TẾ NHƯ NGƯỜI MỸ” CỦA AMY GILLETT Giáo viên hướng dẫn: PGS.TS Nguyễn Xuân Thơm Sinh viên : Bùi Hồng Dinh Khóa : QH 2009 HÀ NỘI – 2013 ACCEPTANCE I hereby state that I: Bui Hoang Dinh from group 09.F1.E24, being a candidate for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (TEFL) accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Bachelor’s Graduation Paper deposited in the library In terms of these conditions, I agree that the origin of my paper deposited in the library should be accessible for the purpose of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the librarians for the care, lo an or reproduction of the paper Hanoi, 25th April 2013 Bui Hoang Dinh i ABSTRACT Translation in economic field has been an attractive part for many researchers; business idiom translation, however, has not been addressed properly due to its complexity and inevitable challenges Concerning business idiom translation, the thesis focuses on the study of students‟ capacity of recognizing business idioms, outstanding problems that the students encounter while translating business idioms then analysis will reveal the strategies that may be employed for better translations The book “Speak business English like an American” by Amy Gillett is chosen as a major data collection for research reference Concurrently, 30 responses for a survey prepared by the researcher will also provide valuable statistics and truth for finding out facts on different issues relating to students‟ business idiom translations The result has shown that almost students claim that they can recognize business idioms when reading business news and magazines However, a small test points out their incapacity of perfectly recognizing all given idioms Besides, their understanding of business idioms is still limited due to the major problems like the difficulties in equivalent expression, the lack of economic background knowledge and other problems in context and naturalness of specific idioms Analysis also gives answer to the question on the most common strategy applied in business idiom translation – paraphrase With different intentions of the translator, the translation will exploit different strategies which will be lately discussed in detail Translating business idioms is now a popular task to all translators and economists as well Therefore, being aware of economic knowledge and linguistic competence is of great importance in producing successful works of business idiom translation ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the completion of this thesis, I am indebted to many people First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Nguyen Xuan Thom for his valuable and prompt advice and support; without which, this thesis could not come into being My sincere thanks also go to all my lecturers and officers at the Faculty of English Language Teaching, University of Languages and International University, Vietnam National University, who have facilitated me with the best possible conditions during four years of studying Last but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to my family for their great love and encouragement Also, I am deeply thankful to my friends whose assistances are of tremendous importance to my writing this thesis Hanoi, April 2013 iii Table of Contents ACCEPTANCE i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES .vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 RATIONALE 1.2 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY .2 1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1.4 SCOPE OF THE STUDY .2 1.5 METHODS OF THE STUDY 1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 1.7 STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY .3 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT OF THE STUDY Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 1.2 PREVIOUS STUDIES TRANSLATION .5 1.2.1 Definition of Translation 1.2.2 Equivalence in translation 1.2.3 Non-equivalence in Translation 1.2.4 Translation procedures .7 1.3 IDIOMS AND TRANSLATION 1.3.1 Definition of idioms .8 1.3.2 Common problems in translating non-equivalence 1.3.3 Translation strategies 11 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT OF THE STUDY 14 Chapter 2: METHODOLOGY 14 2.1 SELECTION OF SUBJECTS 14 iv PART 2: DEVELOPMENT OF THE STUDY 17 Chapter 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 17 3.1 RESULTS FROM THE SURVEY 17 3.1.1 Recognizing business idioms and the frequency of encountering them 17 3.1.2 The outstanding problems that students face 21 3.1.3 Surveyed students’ translations for translation practice test 25 3.2 SUGGESTED TRANSLATION STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESS IDIOM TRANSLATION 32 3.2.1 Translation by using an idiom with similar form and meaning in the target language 32 3.2.2 Translation by using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form 33 3.3.3 Translation by paraphrasing 35 3.3.4 Translation by ellipsis 37 PART 3: CONCLUSION 39 REFERENCE LIST 43 APPENDIX 46 APPENDIX 49 APPENDIX 66 The description of the book is retrieved at Amazon.com on 15th April, 2013 67 Book Description 67 v LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 1: Demonstration of research process Figure 2: Frequency of encountering with business idioms among surveyed students Figure 3: Surveyed students‟ ability of understanding business idioms Figure 4: Major problems as perceived by students Table 1: Statistics in survey results Table 2: Students‟ translations for given business idioms in translation practice test Table 3: Suggested translation for given business idioms in the translation practice test Table 4: Proportion of translation strategies applied by surveyed students vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS SL Source Language TL Target Language ST Source Text TT Target text ULIS University of Languages and International Studies VNU Vietnam National University vii PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 RATIONALE It goes without saying that linguistic constructions like business idioms are involved with metaphors and based on associations of meaning that have not been sufficiently studied yet It stands to the reason that translating idioms appears to be the most difficult task, from identifying an idiom, making it out and distinguishing idiomatic from non-idiomatic usage Therefore, mastering idiomatic understanding is in the urgent need for anyone being fond of making better use of native -like English expressions Especially in business related filed, concise sentences are conventionally appreciated Nevertheless, in the context of broader integration and corporation, business discussions dyed with cultural colors are inevitable; hence specialized idiomatic expressions are applied as a common phenomenon Additionally, day-by-day translators have chances to convey big volume of articles from well-known magazines all over the greatest financial cities around the world The common trend is an amazing number of idioms that always occurs in even the shortest article in any business publication – The Economist, Financial Times, Bloomberg Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, CNN Money and so on It is convinced impossible for translators to use accurate Vietnamese terms to express English business idioms without strategically tackling these complex combinations of words and sentences These aforementioned motivations have therefore inspired the implementation of this study Specific area chosen for the study is impressive idiomatic expressions extracted from 67 – page book named Speak Business English like American by Amy Gillett This will be carried out with the title: ... NGOẠI NGỮ KHOA SƯ PHẠM TIẾNG ANH - - KHÓA LUẬN TỐT NGHIỆP KHÓ KHĂN CỦA SINH VIÊN KHI DỊCH ANH – VIỆT THÀNH NGỮ KINH TẾ TRONG QUYỂN SÁCH “NÓI TIẾNG ANH KINH TẾ NHƯ NGƯỜI MỸ” CỦA AMY GILLETT. .. SÁCH “NÓI TIẾNG ANH KINH TẾ NHƯ NGƯỜI MỸ” CỦA AMY GILLETT Giáo viên hướng dẫn: PGS.TS Nguyễn Xuân Thơm Sinh viên : Bùi Hồng Dinh Khóa : QH 2009 HÀ NỘI – 2013 ACCEPTANCE I hereby state that I:... like American by Amy Gillett This will be carried out with the title: “English – Vietnamese translation of business idioms in the book Speak Business English like an American by Amy Gillett? ?? 1.2