Họ và tên: Nguyễn Thị Mai Anh

MSV: 20F7510547

Group: 3

MID-TERM TEST 2
I.THEORY

1. What lexical features should be considered when you translate a text? Give reasons
for your answer and include any relevant examples from your OWN knowledge or
experience to support your ideas.

Lexical features should be considered when translate a text

1.1. Content

The content itself determines the meaning of words. Therefore, their meaning should be
solved in the context. It is commonly known that a word may have equivalents and
accordingly the analysis of its meaning has to be made carefully in order to pick out the
most appropriate word. It is characteristic of word that a single lexical item may have
several meanings.

For example, the word “head” in isolation means something like “ the upper part of the
body”. But the same word used in the context of talking about a company or an
organization has nothing to di with a human body though the idea of the upper positions
of something still remains.

“Although he is the head of the company, he has no head (leader-intelligence).”

1.2. Word collocation

Word collocation consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings
of words which tend to occur in its environment. Each of language has it own principle in
word collocation.

For example, the word “pretty” often goes with girls and women, while the word
“handsome” often goes with boys or men.

1.3. Misuse of personal pronouns

In Vietnamese, there are many ways to express the thoughts and feelings or attitude
which differ from those in English. The social stuatus, age, sex and the family order are
distinguished clearly and systematically.

For example: “I love you very much, dear.” -> “ em yêu anh nhiều lắm, chồng yêu.” /
“mẹ yêu con nhiều lắm, con yêu.” This case show clearly that the translator sometimes do
not master the relationship between the speaker and the hearer leading to a funny
translation.

1.4. Misuse of synonyms

Some translators depend largely on the meaning in dictionary picking out the synonyms
without paying too much to the contect. In fact, the pairs of synonyms share at least one
sense in common but do not share all their senses. To some extent, they can hardly
substitute for each other

“You have my deep/profound sympathy.” (acceptable)

“The river is deep.” (acceptable)

“The river is very profound.” (unacceptable)

Some translators do not realize the connotational meaning, which leads to the distorting
of the meaning of the sentence.

For example, “famous (nổi tiếng)” and “notorious (khét tiếng)”: while “famous” means
“well-known/celebrated” and therefore contains some features of positive meaning,
“notorious” means “well-known” especially for unfavotable reason and negative
meaning.

3. What is non-equivalence at word level in translation? What are the strategies to deal
with non-equivalence at word level in translation? Give reasons for your answer and
include any relevant examples from your OWN knowledge or experience to support
your ideas.

According to Baker (1992), “non-equivalence at word level means that the target
language has no direct equivalent for a word which occurs in the source text”.

How to deal with non-equivalence at word level in translation:

3.1. Translating by a more specific word

In some cases, it may be appropriate to use a more specific word to translate an English
word into Vietnamese. This usually involves choosing among sevaral words, as there
may be many Vietnamese words that correspond to the general category or meaning
expressed by English word.

For example, the English word for “rice” can be translated by many different Vietnamese
words, depending on whether one is planting it, havesting it, cooking it or eating it. In
this case, the English word alone is not enough to determine the appropriate Vietnamese
translation and it is necessary to examine the English context.

3.2. Translating by a more general word

In other cases, it may be appropriate to use a more genral word to translate an English
word with no specific Vietnamese equivalent.

For example, the English word “paw” , “foot” , “leg” may all be translated by the
Vietnamese word “chân”, which does not suggest any problems of comprehension in
Vietnamese, as it should be clear from the context which of these words is meant.

3.3. Translating by cultural substituion

This strategy involves replacing a culture-specific item or expression with one of the
different meanings but similar impact in the translated text.

For example, For example, “tử vi” is the forecast of a person’s fate based on the relative
positions of the stars. It is similar to horoscope in Western culture. Therefore, “tử vi” is
often translated as “horoscope”. Although the nature of the two concepts is different,
using the word “horoscope” would ensure the immediate understanding of Western
readers (who are the target readers of the novel’s English version).

In short, the strategy of using a cultural substitution works best when there is a concept in
the target language with the same cultural impact on the TL readers as in the SL readers.
However, this technique should be used with caution as not everyone is tolerable with
replacing cultural-specific words and expressions with another, even though it may
produce the same result.

3.4. Translating by using a load word

There is some objetion to this strategy in Vietnam, as many translator prefer to coin new
words in Vietnamese rather than borrow English words. However, this strategy is very
useful when the translator deal with concepts or ideas that are new to Vietnamese people,
culture-specific items and proper names of diseases or medicines that are widely known
in English names.

For example, HIV and AIDS are two loan words that are frequently used in Vietnamese,
as they are referred to by their English names in almost every part of the world. Because
these words have been in common used in Vietnam for a long time, they are often used
without any accompanying explanation.

3.5. Translating by using a paraphrase

This strategy can be used when we translate an English word or concept that does not
exist in Vietnamese or when the Vietnamese term for it does not include all meanings
conveyed by th English term for the same concept.

For example, For example, the word “mửa mật” is translated into “practicing their asses
off”. Both the word in the original and the phrase in the translated text are slangs
meaning “to work very hard”.

3.6. Translating by omission

This strategy is appropriate to omit words or phrases that are not essential to the meaning
or impact of the text. This is especially true for words that would require lengthy
explanation, awkward paraphrases or literal and unatural translations, which would
interrupt the flow of the text and could distract the reader from the overall meaning.

For example, “my father, who is very good at English, is working for a foreign
company” -> “Bố tôi rất giỏi Tiếng Anh, ông đang làm việc cho một công ty nước
ngoài”. In Vietnamese style, who (a relative pronoun) is usually omitted during
translation because it is irrelavant (in Vietnamese, we don’t say “bố tôi, người mà…”)

5. What is untranslatability? What are the strategies to deal with untranslatability?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your OWN
knowledge or experience to support your ideas.

Untranslatability, according to Catford (1965), “translation fails – or untranslatabilty

occurs – when it is possible to build functionally relevant features of the situation into the
contextual meaning of the target language text”.

How to deal with untranslatability:

5.1. Transliteration
Transliteration is the term alluding to some words that could not be rendered exactly into
another dialect, but it helps you to pronounce that word correctly.

For example, “tuýp” in Vietnamese has an exactly similar sound to “tube” in English: “
Excuse me, I want to buy a tube of toothpaste” -> “Xin lỗi, bán cho tôi một tuýp kem
đánh răng”.

As we can see, “tube” is directly transferred into “tuýp” from English to Vietnamese.
Since no word in Vietnamese can be replaced for “tube” in English, so the easiest way is
to pronounce by the target language styles and word rules.

5.2. Transposition

Transposition means to change a small unit of a grammatical function as a word in a

sentence by different structure with different positions of that word.

For example: A: “How are you today?”

B: “I’m fine. Thanks.”

A: “Hôm nay bạn khỏe không?”

B: “Tôi khỏe, cảm ơn.”

In this example, “are” plays a grammatical function in an English sentence; however,

there is no “are” in the Vietnamese version. So, there is only way to solve this is to skip
the functional grammatical word in Vietnamese.

5.3. Transcreation

Transcreation use translator’s creation into rendering. There are so many cases in real life
like translating film’s names, poems,…

For example: “Despicable Me” -> “Kẻ Cắp Mặt Trăng”

“Bố Già” -> “Dad, I’m Sorry”

In this cases, translators have no other choice but to follow the content of the movie then
create a new name based on it.

5.4. Modulation
This strategy depends on how various points of view there are which takes place mostly
in translating the same content but the results are completely different to each other even
in one language to another language and vice versa.

For example: “police” / “cop” -> “công an” / “cớm”

In this case, “police” or “cop” is translated into “công an” in Vietnamese in a normal
way. But “cớm” is used as a touch of sarcasm and contemptuous word that Vietnamese
people call for “công an” or “cảnh sát”, is the untranslatable word because there is no
parallel word in English has exact meaning as “cớm” in Vietnamese.

5.5. Cultural equivalence

Cultural equivalence means to translate the culture – the ways people apply their mother
language as English structures.

For example, when people mention an action of twisting the gas handler of a motorcycle
to warm up the engine inside, they use “ đề pa” as a verb of this. “đề pa” is originated
from “to depart”. Those could not be translated because they do not share the same
meaning, so they unstranlatable words again.

II. EXERCISE

1. The author explains why most the Finns enjoy a nature holiday in the lakes and
describes their ideal home there.

2. The purpose is to extract all content and expressive value to then reformulate them in
the target language. Read the source language text carefully to grasp words belonging to
a particular culture that the translator cannot fully understand.

3. It is very difficult to perfectly and beautifully translate these words from English to
Vietnamese. This is a descriptive text about a part of the Finnish way of life so we cannot
translate it roughly. Therefore, when preparing to translate into English, I consulted those
words with many different translations to come up with the best translation.

For example, "retreat" can be understood in many different ways such as "sự rút lui", "nơi
tu đạo" but in this text it should be translated as "chỗ nghỉ" or "nhà nghỉ".

4. Each sentence will be separated by a comma or semicolon, making it difficult to

translate the sentence completely and properly. In these two sentences, if translated in a
word-for-word style, it will not impress the readers as well as make the sentence rough
and confusing.
In the first sentence, instead of putting "ideally" at the beginning of the sentence, I put it
forward from "cottage" to "the ideally cottage" -> "ngôi nhà lý tưởng".

In the second sentence, put "water might be well-drawn" behind and it will be translated
as “Mặc dù có điện nhưng người ta vẫn ưa chuộng đèn nến hơn vì dưới ánh nến lung linh,
mặt nước trở nên kỳ ảo hơn.”

The word "most" would be translated as “mọi thứ ở đây”.

5. Translate the text into Vietnamese

THẢ HỒN CÙNG SÔNG NƯỚC

Ngạn ngữ Phần Lan có câu: “Im lặng là đỉnh cao của hạnh phúc.” Điều này giúp
giải thích tại sao trong khi cả Châu Âu đổ xô về biển để nghỉ ngơi thì dân Phần Lan lại
thích nghỉ bên hồ hơn để thả hồn vào thế giới riêng của mình. Một phần tư dân số Phần
Lan có nhà nghỉ ở miền quê sử dụng cho cả mùa đông lẫn mùa hè. Dường như có mối
liên kết huyền bí giữa người Phần Lan và cái họ gọi là “thiên nhiên”, mối quan hệ giữa
giá trị tinh thần với lạc thú đời thường.

Mãi cho đến thập niên 1950, Phần Lan chủ yếu sống nhờ vào nông nghiệp. nhiều
nhà nghỉ mùa hè là các trang trại được các gia đình có chủ nhân sống ở thành phố giao
lại. Ngôi nhà lý tưởng phải soi mình xuống mặt hồ, giữa khu rừng yên tĩnh. Ngôi nhà
phải có một lò sưởi, một mái hiên thơ mộng, một con thuyền, một bến đỗ và không thể
thiếu một phòng tắm hơi và một vườn rau nhỏ. Mọi thứ ở đây được gọt đẻo sơ sài bằng
một loại gỗ thô nhưng tạo cảm giác ấm cúng. Mặc dù có điện nhưng người ta vẫn ưa
chuộng đèn nến hơn vì dưới ánh nến lung linh, mặt nước trở nên kỳ ảo hơn. Càng ít ràng
buộc với hiện đại càng tốt.