Some problems encountered by the 4th year english students at vinh university when translating vietnamese sales contract into english equivalents

VINH UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT ********** LƯƠNG THỊ HUYỀN TRANG SOME PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED BY THE 4TH YEAR ENGLISH STUDENTS AT VINH UNIVERSITY WHEN TRANSLATING VIETNAMESE SALES CONTRACT INTO ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS (MỘT SỐ KHÓ KHĂN CỦA SINH VIÊN TIẾNG ANH NĂM THỨ TƯ TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC VINH KHI DỊCH HỢP ĐỒNG THƯƠNG MẠI TIẾNG VIỆT SANG TIẾNG ANH) GRADUATION THESIS Field : Linguistics Vinh – 2011 VINH UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT ********** SOME PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED BY THE 4TH YEAR ENGLISH STUDENTS AT VINH UNIVERSITY WHEN TRANSLATING VIETNAMESE SALES CONTRACT INTO ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS (MỘT SỐ KHÓ KHĂN CỦA SINH VIÊN TIẾNG ANH NĂM THỨ TƯ TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC VINH KHI DỊCH HỢP ĐỒNG THƯƠNG MẠI TIẾNG VIỆT SANG TIẾNG ANH) GRADUATION THESIS Field : Linguistics Student: Lương Thị Huyền Trang, K48B Supervisor: Lê Thị Thúy Hà, M.A Vinh – 2011 Acknowledgements For the completion of this work, I have been received invaluable contributions from many people First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, M.A Le Thi Thuy Ha for her absolutely indispensable assistance, useful suggestions, and critical comment, step by step guiding me during my study paper Without her help, my work would not have been complete I owned her a debt of gratitude that can not be measured My special words of thanks to Dean and Leading Board of Foreign Languages Department, who gave me opportunities to study and my thesis paper I am also grateful to all other teachers at the Foreign Languages Department for all their enthusiasm and suggestions which help me overcome difficulties in the process of my study In addition, I am greatly thanks to the people who work in Department of Planning and Investment and Department of Industry and Commercial for giving me documents and invaluable conditions while the research was being done As always I wish to express my special thanks to students from K48B1, K48B2 for their assistance and cooperation My warmest thanks to members of my family for their encouragement, support to me to fulfill this thesis Finally, I am aware that without the advice and support, my project is far from complete Thus, my sole responsibility for any inadequacies and shortcomings that the thesis may be considered to have Vinh, May 8th, 2011 Luong Thi Huyen Trang i Abstract This study is an investigation into sales contracts translation strategies of students of Foreign Languages Department in Vinh University It purposes to find out students’ mistakes and difficulties when translating Sales Contracts, then suggest guides and solution for them Thus, I has stimulated the author in doing the study In chapter 1, the author gave the definition, profits, features of translation, Sales Contracts and Discourse analysis In chapter 2, giving the description of the survey, result of the data, analysing students problems, causes of these problems in chapter Suggesting solutions will be presented in chapter Finally, some implications to English teaching and translating are provided in the hope that readers will benenfit from it ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Page i ii ABSTRACT TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I - INTRODUCTION Justification of the Study Aims and Objective of the Study Methods of the Study Scope of the Study Format of the Study PART II - CONTENTS CHAPTER THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Translation 1.1 What is translation? 1.2 Why is Translation? 1.3 Process of translating 1.3.1 The Approach 1.3.2 The unit of translation 1.4 Types of Translation 1.4.1 Form based 1.4.2 Meaning based 1.5 Translation method 1.5.1 Word for word Translation 1.5.2 Literal Translation 1.5.3 Faithful Translation 1.5.4 Semantic Translation 1.5.5 Adaptation 1.5.6 Free Translation 1.5.7 Idiomatic Translation 1.5.8 Communicative Translation 1.6 Translation equivalence Sales Contracts 2.1 What is a Sales Contract? 2.2 Why are Sales Contracts made? 2.3 Register 2.3.1 What is register? 2.3.2 The parameters of register 2.3.3 Use of grammar 2.4.Theme and rheme Discourse Analysis 3.1 Written discourse 3.2 Discourse context 3.3 Cohesive devices 3.3.1 Reference 3.3.2 Ellipsis 3.3.3 Substitution iii 2 3 4 6 7 8 8 9 9 10 11 11 11 12 12 12 13 13 14 14 14 14 14 14 15 iii 3.3.4 Conjunction 3.3.5 Lexical cohesion 15 15 CHAPTER THE STUDY 1.1 Overview of the Study 1.2 Description of the survey and the test 1.3 Research setting 1.4 Description of Subject 1.5 Data Instrument 1.6 Procedure Analysis of the data 2.1 Result of the survey 2.2.Result of the Translation test 2.2.1 Words using 2.2.2 Language style 2.2.3 Sentence Structures 2.2.4 Grammar choice CHAPTER - SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR TRANSLATING PRACTICE 3.1 Some suggestion for translating Words and Phrases 3.2 Some suggestion for translating Structures and using Grammar 3.2.1 Suggestions for Structures 3.2.2 Suggestions for Grammar 3.3 Some suggestions for using Language style 3.4 Good knowledge of Forms and Characteristics of Sales contract both Source Language and Target Ones PART III – CONCLUSION Recapitulation and Implications Suggestions for further Studies REFERENCES APPENDIX iv Part I: introduction 16 16 17 17 17 17 18 18 22 22 26 28 30 33 35 35 36 37 39 40 41 Justification of the Study Legal acts appeared long ago in the history of human beings Modern law code was written several recent decades ago Nowadays, more and more law codes have been promulgated Thus, research on the language of legal acts is very necessary It is not easy to understand legal documents structurally and linguistically because its communicative purposes differ from the ordinary genres Sales contracts are a form of written documents used as a mean to bind business partners to legal obligations It is no exaggeration to say that sales contracts can lead to the success of failure of a company Many bitter lessons have been drawn from the fact that a number of Vietnamese companies have been driven to unfavorable situations due to poor translation or inexperienced contract makers’ ignorance Therefore, sales contract translation has played an important role in the success of the economy Translation in general and sales contract translation in particular, in fact, is one of the most difficult and challenging jobs It requires a translator not only good knowledge of topic issue but also other things such as background knowledge, culture of target community and purposes of translation etc Translations will be considered to fail if the readership misunderstands, disagrees or feels strange Then it is essential for translators and English lecturers to have good knowledge of contract making and translation so that we can avoid failures and mistakes The author, herself, a student of foreign languages department found some difficulties and challenges when dealing with sales contract translation Her ambition in this study is only to identify some difficulties that students may have and to help them overcome these difficulties Hopefully, the study is a contribution to English teaching and learning, and a good source of reference for those who are interested in the area Aims and Objectives of the Study 2.1 Aims of the Study Originating from the above reasons, this graduation paper is aimed at: - Firstly, searching the translation theory and giving clearly the advantages of translation - Secondly, applying translation methods - Thirdly, clarifying the special features and languages used in English Sales contracts to students - Fourthly, analyzing the structure of English Sale Contracts in terms of discourse analysis - In addition, investigate the difficulties which the third year student of Foreign Languages Department in Vinh University face in translating Sales contracts - Most importantly, identifying some some implications in the hope of helping learners of English to improve their competence to analyse a contract and translate good contracts 2.2 Objectives of the Study This study aims at studying: - The Importance of Sales Contracts in business - Problems which the students often get in translating Sales Contracts - Causes of these problems - Awareness of students in practicing translation - Ability of the the students in translating Sales Contracts Methods of the Study First of all, the author makes a detail plan of procedure Then collecting Sales contracts, after that studying materials, documents which related to the topic Next, the author classifies grammatical and linguistic materials concerning to discourse features The next is analyzing all the information selected from English Sales Contracts and Vietnamese Sales Contracts Furthermore, the author gets the contribution from the supervisor, lecturer and classmates The author makes hypothesis and questions for the problem, collecting data to answer the hypothesis Then the author defines the participants, time and place to research Moreover, the author uses both qualitative and quantitative research to solve the problem Because the topic request opinions and also figures In qualitative, the author uses open-ended questions, and closed- ended questions for quantitative research Then the author makes a survey to get figures and opinions Finally, the information obtained will be dealt with, analyzed in order to reach some conclusions on the subject - matter under investigation, and necessary comments should be accordingly made Scope of the Study Within the scope of this thesis, a full catalogue of Sales Contracts feature, discourse features of English is too broad It seems impossible to go deep into all of them due to the time limitation, resource constrains Thus, this paper wishes to touch upon some prominent features of translation, discourse and Sales Contracts with the following concerns: Firstly, the theoretical scope of the Study mainly focuses on Translation, Sales Contracts, Discourse analysis, Discourse structure Secondly, the practical scope of the Study is limited to written Sales contracts and the focus of data analysis is cohesive devices, coherence and some register characteristics of Sales Contracts In short, we present some findings from the Study It is hoped that this study will be of some use to teaching and learning English process And due to the time limitation, we only focus on translation Sales Contracts from Vietnamese into English equivalents Format of the Study The Study includes three main parts Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Contents Chapter 1: Theoretical background Chapter 2: An analysis of the structure of English Sales Contracts Chapter 3: The Study Part 3: Conclusion Part ii: Investigation Chapter 1: Theoretical background Translation 1.1 What is Translation? It is said that “ Translation is an art and a science” It deals with language in use rather than language as a system The term “translation” itself can refer to meanings: it can be the product (the text that is translated) or the process (the act of producing translation, another way to say translating) Traditionally, translation is the phenomenon which is considered an “art” However, recently it is accessed from a more technical point of view by a number of linguists Cart Ford (1965) defines translation as the replacement of textual material in one language (source language) by equivalent textual material in another language (target language) Marlone (1988) claims that “ translation is the expression in another language (or target language) of what has been expressed in another source language preserving semantic and stylistic equivalence” Whereas Bell (1991) holds that translation is the “tranformation of a text originally in one language in to an equivalent text is a different language retaining, as far as possible, the content of the message, and the formal features and the roles of the original text” According to the Merrian Webster dictionary (1974): “Translation consists of changing from one state or form to another, to turn into one own or another language” As mentioned above, translation is basically a change of form The form of a language refers to the actual words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc The forms are referred to as the “surface structure” of a language Translators replace the form of the source language by the form of the target language Translation, aims at equivalence between the source language and the target language in terms of lexical, grammatical, structure, context of communication and structure identity To this end, translator must use the lexicon, grammatical structure of the target language in an appropriate way in respect of communicative and cultural context to rebuild the same meaning According to Wilhelm K Weber in “Training Translators and Conference Interpreters”: Translation is the transposition of a text written in a source language into a target language The translated version must be absolutely accurate in meaning contain .. .VINH UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT ********** SOME PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED BY THE 4TH YEAR ENGLISH STUDENTS AT VINH UNIVERSITY WHEN TRANSLATING VIETNAMESE SALES CONTRACT INTO ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS. .. investigation into sales contracts translation strategies of students of Foreign Languages Department in Vinh University It purposes to find out students? ?? mistakes and difficulties when translating Sales. .. of Sales Contracts in business - Problems which the students often get in translating Sales Contracts - Causes of these problems - Awareness of students in practicing translation - Ability of the