HANOI PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY 2

FACULTY OF ENGLISH

TOPIC 11

DIFFICULTIES IN DEALING WITH NON-EQUIVALENCE AT

WORD LEVEL IN VIETNAMESE - ENGLISH TRANSLATION
FACING SECOND-YEAR ENGLISH LANGUAGE MAJOR
STUDENTS AT HANOI PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY 2 AND
SOME PROPOSED SOLUTIONS.

CLASS: ENG217.46nna.2_LT

Supervisor: Nguyễn Thị Hồng Nhật

Name of student: Nguyễn Phí Thu Hạnh

Student code: 207220201023

Phuc Yen, 25 December 2022

Table of Contents
ABSTRACT 1
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 2
1. The rationale of the research 2
2. Research questions 3
3. Research objectives 3
4. The scope of the research 3
5. The significance of the research 3
6. Designed the research 3
1. Equivalence at the word level 4
2. Previous research 4
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 6
1. Research design 6
2. Research context and Participants 7
3. Instruments of data collection 8
3.1. Documentation survey 8
3.2. Interview 9
4. Data analysis method 10
5. Summary 10
CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 11
1. Analysis of the survey 11
2. The analysis of the interview 14
3. Discussion 14
4. Summary 15
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 16
REFERENCE 18
 ABSTRACT
This research will concentrate on the issue of mistranslation and the inability to
find equivalent words while translating documents from Vietnamese to English. It
will demonstrate how students frequently make mistakes when translating and
offer remedies for these faults. The study will be done on 20 students using the
provided texts. After being pointed out and informed about the root of their errors,
the students will be able to identify the same errors in the subsequent translation,
comprehend the source of their errors, and continue to develop their knowledge.
With this study, the research will enable students majoring in translation to obtain
effective translation abilities via experience and learning.

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1. The rationale of the research

The translation is a type of written language translation in which the translator is in

charge of translating the text from one language to another. As a result of the effect
of globalisation, translation is becoming increasingly vital nowadays, making the
interchange of people and nations more fascinating than ever. English is one of the
most often used business languages. Despite not being a very challenging language
to learn, English is rather different, especially for us Vietnamese. It is a low-
context culture and is a foreign language from the West with a different style of
thinking and speaking than Vietnamese. As a result, it might be difficult to
translate some Vietnamese phrases and words into English with equivalent
meanings, and vice versa.
In the article, Kang Ning writes, “The presence of English along with Vietnamese
in public spaces in Vietnam can be seen as a sign of development and integration
like many other similar contexts in the world” (Kang & Zhang, 2008, p.2).
However, there are several flaws in Vietnam's existing language transfer from
Vietnamese to English. These views are mostly concerned with typos, syntax, and
lexical meanings created by negative interference from the source language, but
differences in cultural and pragmatic variables that impact language usage and
translation are not adequately explored.
This is a challenging issue for translators, particularly students while translating
process. Students make mistakes while translating Vietnamese text into English
since they are still learning and experiencing things, thus they don't have a great
deal of knowledge and comprehension. Sophomore English majors at Hanoi
Pedagogical University 2 are just getting acquainted with the subject of intensive
translation, therefore they will make mistakes as they study and experience. The
usage of equivalency terms when translating Vietnamese papers into English is one
of the typical errors that might be cited. Considering the aforementioned reasons, I
decided to research "Difficulties in dealing with non-equivalence at word level in
Vietnamese - English translation facing second-year English language major
students at Hanoi Pedagogical University 2".

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 2. Research questions

Several queries are posed by action research, including:

- What is the word-level equivalent of meaning?

- What translation mistakes did the sophomore at HPU2 make when
translating materials from Vietnamese to English?
- What are the causes of these typical mistakes?
- What are recommendations to fix these mistakes?
3. Research objectives

- The general research area of this study is translation and differences between
Vietnamese and English
- The participants involved in the study are ten sophomore English major
students at HPU2.
4. The scope of the research

This study's scope is limited to students at Hanoi Pedagogical University 2 which

have ten students taking part in this study.
5. The significance of the research

The study will demonstrate the typical translational equivalence mistakes that
sophomore students at Hanoi Pedagogical University 2 frequently encounter. To
help people improve their translations in the future, their errors will be examined
and replaced with the appropriate translations. Students will gain from the study by
having a better perspective of translation, getting to the bottom of their errors, and
avoiding making the same mistakes again.
6. Designed the research

The research is divided into the following five chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction: This part explains the rationale for choosing the topic
and methodology and the tasks and objectives.
Chapter 2: Literature review: briefly presents theoretical background about
translation and non-equivalence translation problem.
Chapter 3: Methodology: presents the methods used in the study.
Chapter 4: Findings and discussion: shows the detailed results and analysis of
the survey
Chapter 5: Conclusion: Summarizes the whole thesis before discussing some
limitations of the study and then gives some suggestions for further study.

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Equivalence at the word level
In Translation Studies, equivalence is an important concept. There are many levels
of equivalence, and word-level equivalence is the lowest level. Although
translators do not normally work on word-for-word equivalence, the discussion
may serve as the basic step in dealing with non-equivalence found in the source
text.
Baker (1992) defines a word as the smallest unit of language which we would
expect to possess individual meaning. In translation, everything would be easier if
there were a one-to-one relationship between words and meaning in the various
languages. But it isn’t so.
According to Cruse, in Baker (1992), there are four types of meaning in words and
utterances: propositional meaning, expressive meaning, presupposed meaning and
evoked meaning. Presupposed meaning arises from selectional and collocational
restrictions, while evoked meaning arises from dialect and register variation which
covers field, tenor and mode of discourse. All types of the above lexical meaning
contribute to the overall meaning of an utterance or a text. In the case of problems
of non-equivalence, Baker suggests that it is useful to view the semantic fields and
lexical sets of a language. Understanding the semantic field and lexical sets can be
useful to appreciate the value that a word has in a given system and to develop
strategies for dealing with non-equivalence.
2. Previous research
The problem of word-level equivalence in this Vietnamese - English translation
has had many related studies. The thesis of author Tran Luu Hoang Ngoc Van
Trang can be mentioned with the title "An Analysis of Negative Verbs' Equivalents
in a Vietnamese Translation of 'The Call of the Wild" by Jack London (1903). Her
research focuses on translators Lam Hoai and Vo Quang's translation (2019) of
"The Call of the Wild", emphasizing how to translate negative verbs from English
to Vietnamese and evaluating the equivalence between the source text and target
text. Her research is very detailed, both analyzing and showing how flexible
translators are when translating negative verbs based on the context, and also
determining how often translators use those words and Finally, evaluating whether
the translated words are suitable or not.
Another factor affecting the equivalence in Vietnamese-English translations is the
cultural context. With this issue, author Pham Truong Ngoc Linh has researched
"American English and Vietnamese Use in Public Signs: A Pragmatic Cultural
Comparison and Translation" about the fact that the signs in Vietnam, when
rewritten in English, use the structure again. The structure is unfamiliar, unnatural
4
or even misleading in the meaning it wants to convey. Thereby, he proposed more
suitable translations for some signs and hoped that his contribution would help
foreigners not to misunderstand the meaning of the signs.
In general, the above studies have shown partial equivalence and equivalence in
Vietnamese-English and English-Vietnamese translations. My research is built on
the theoretical premise of the previous theories, and at the same time, is aimed
specifically at second-year students of Hanoi Pedagogical University 2, helping
them expand their knowledge of translation.

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CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

The research method will be explained in this chapter based on research

intuition, pros and cons, and data from previous studies. The chapter will
be divided into these three parts: In the first section, the study design will
be described along with possible research methods. The second section
will contain extensive information on the research technique. A broad
description of the participants and specific information on the research
technique will be given in this section. Finally, the survey data will be
scrutinised for the overview.

The research will answer the question:

- What translation mistakes did the sophomore at HPU2 make when
translating materials from Vietnamese to English?
- What are the causes of these typical mistakes?
1. Research design
The research will adopt a qualitative approach. It is defined by Denzin and
Lincoln (1994):
Qualitative research is multimethod in focus, involving an interpretive,
naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative
researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense
of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.
(p.2)
Pritha Bhandari (2020) also highlighted that “Qualitative research is used
to understand how people experience the world. While there are many
approaches to qualitative research, they tend to be flexible and focus on
retaining rich meaning when interpreting data.”
From the mentioned-above statements, the qualitative method is expected to
resolve the problems posed in this research. This approach used in this study
would help explore the student’s experiences and perspectives on the topic
study. Plus, this method presented the advantage of testing the applicability
of theories of students in different situation translation. As a consequence,
the translation ability of students participating in the survey would be tested
and enriched with their translation experience in similar translation

6
 situations. The research was anticipated to give positive change in the way
of learning translation for the sophomore at Ha Noi Pedagogical University
2.

2. Research context and Participants

The investigation was carried out at Hanoi Pedagogical University 2.

While being supervised by their lecturers throughout the learning
process, students at the school have improved their understanding of
translation, but they still frequently select words that do not have an
equivalent meaning or utilise incorrect phrases in comparison to the
original material.

Ten sophomores of English majors in Hanoi Pedagogical University 2

participated in the study. Second-year students were selected as
research subjects because of several reasons. Firstly, they were no
longer unfamiliar with the curriculum and method of learning English
at university. Second, after studying English for about two years, they
had a certain level of proficiency. Additionally, they come from
different regions and have multiple levels of translation.

Participants would finish the texts the researcher assigned to them in

the time allowed without assistance from a third party or an auto-
translator. After that, three students who had indicated an interest in
participating in the interview were also interviewed. The students were
assigned the codes S1, S2, and S3. The goal of the interviews was to
obtain thorough responses to the research’s problem.

Two texts will be given to the students, who must complete them
within the specified time and without the support of another person or
translator. This will ensure the survey's accuracy, and students may use
it to gauge their translation skills.

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3. Instruments of data collection

3.1. Documentation survey

Twenty translations from Vietnamese to English carried out by second-

year English major students were gathered for mistake analysis. The
goal was to collect quantitative data to address Research Question 1,
and the data collected would be organised in a reasonable manner to
provide the most accurate statistics.

Students that participate in the survey would be watched to ensure they

are not utilising translation tools in order to promote fairness and
accuracy. Each of them would be informed of the findings of the survey
and will be encouraged to learn from their errors to avoid repeating
them. This survey would help students fix their errors, particularly
when they cannot discover terms that are equal to the original text.

The first text:

Đạt mốc 200 tỷ USD năm nay là sớm hơn một năm so với kế hoạch
mà Tổng thống Nga Vladimir Putin và Chủ tịch Trung Quốc Tập Cận
Bình đề ra năm 2019. Trong đó, hợp tác năng lượng với Trung Quốc
vẫn là "ưu tiên" của Nga.

Kinh tế Nga – Trung Quốc ngày càng xích lại gần nhau sau khi xung
đột tại Ukraine nổ ra, khiến phương Tây áp lệnh trừng phạt Moskva.
Năm ngoái, thương mại hai nước tăng gần 30% lên kỷ lục 190 tỷ
USD, chủ yếu nhờ lĩnh vực năng lượng. Năm nay, thương mại song
phương vẫn đi lên và tăng 41% trong 4 tháng đầu năm, theo số liệu
của Hải quan Trung Quốc.

Theo TASS, ông Mishustin nói quan hệ hai nước "đang ở mức cao
chưa từng có". Ông khẳng định Nga và Trung Quốc "luôn tôn trọng
lợi ích của nhau". Phó thủ tướng Nga Alexander Novak dự báo xuất
8
 khẩu năng lượng của Nga sang Trung Quốc có thể tăng 40% năm
nay.

The second text:

"Pin đại dương sinh học thu nhỏ được lấy cảm hứng từ các hệ sinh
thái vi sinh vật biển", tác giả chính Zhu Huawei từ Phòng thí nghiệm
Trọng điểm Nhà nước Trung Quốc về Tài nguyên Vi sinh vật, cho
biết.

Các loại tảo như tảo lục lam, còn được gọi là vi khuẩn lam, là sinh
vật sản xuất chính trong hệ sinh thái vi sinh vật biển. Chúng hấp thụ
năng lượng mặt trời và carbon dioxide cố định để sản xuất chất hữu
cơ. Thông qua đó, năng lượng mặt trời được chuyển cho các electron
và lưu trữ trong chất hữu cơ.

Sau khi phân hủy, một số chất hữu cơ lắng xuống trầm tích dưới đáy
biển, nơi chúng trở thành dinh dưỡng cho vi sinh vật và tham gia vào
quá trình trao đổi chất của chúng.

3.2. Interview

An interview would have proceeded to get insight perspectives into the

root of the problem as well as the particular respondent's attitudes,
reactions and experiences through the interaction between interviewer
and interviewee. As a result, the researcher made the decision to
conduct interviews with three English majors who had shown an
interest in taking part. The pupils were assigned the codes S1, S2, and
S3. The interviews were designed to provide comprehensive responses
to all study questions.
The interviews mainly focused on three questions:
● How did you feel during the translation process?
● Did you find it challenging to translate? What do you suppose is the

9
 cause of those?
● What words and phrases do you find hard to translate?

4. Data analysis method

Document survey data and participant responses to interviews served as

the study's primary data sources. Data from the document survey was
presented by a table and utilised to identify and examine translation
errors and non-equivalent word use while translating made by pupils.
Additionally, deep insight would also be gained by an analysis of the
interviewees' responses.
5. Summary
In summary, the chapter gave an outline of action research, which was
used for the current study's research approach. Ten Hanoi Pedagogical
University 2 second-year students were also included as research
participants. Then, two study tools—the document survey and
interview—were employed to analyse the students' translation errors.
The techniques for data analysis were afterwards presented. In the next
chapter, the current study's findings are provided in answer to research
questions.

10
CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

Introduction

This chapter reports the findings of the study and analyzes data collected from the
survey and interview, in response to two research questions concerning the
translation problem of sophomores at Hanoi Pedagogical University 2 and promote
their ability to translate Vietnamese-English texts. The results of this stage directly
answer research questions which are:

- What translation mistakes did the sophomore at HPU2 make when

translating materials from Vietnamese to English?
- What are the causes of these typical mistakes?

The following chapter will present and discuss the results in these four main parts:
Analysis of the survey, analysis of the interview, discussion and summary.

1. Analysis of the survey

4.2.1. Common translation mistakes

The following table presents the common mistakes students made when translating
a text from Vietnamese into English.

Table. Common errors are recorded from document survey

Categorization Number of errors Percentage (%)

112 33,4
Linguistic Non-equivalent
word choices

53 15,8
Errors Punctuation

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 13 3,8
The use of articles

16 4,8
Prepositions

86 25,7
Translational Obscure
expression

47 14
Errors Terminology

8 2,5
Inconsistency

Total 335 100

Surprisingly, non-equivalent word choices accounted for 33,4% of all errors found,
making them the most frequent linguistic mistakes. The obscure expression also
came in as the second most common kind of translational mistake (25,7% of all
errors made). The following section would provide a more in-depth explanation of
the information at issue.

● Linguistic errors: Non-equivalent word choices

According to the document survey, non-equivalent word choice accounted for

33,4% of all student translation mistakes, making it the most problematic issue.
Following a review of the documents, the following word pairings were found to
be misused: make - impose, ban - sanctions, are at an all-time high - at a level
never seen before, Chinese government's focus on microbial resources - key
laboratory of microbiological resources Chinese, luc lam algae - blue-green
algae, lammaphyer - cyanobacteria, seafar - bottom of the sea, etc.

12
With just 53 and 13 errors in those translations, respectively, the student's use of
articles and punctuation was not an enormous obstacle. This explained why the
interview with students S1, S2, and S3 did not reflect the usage of articles and
punctuation.

● Translational errors: Obscure expression:

It came as a surprise that a marked number of 86 expression-related errors were

detected. This signified that expression was among the most problematic aspect of
students’ translation.

The examples will be presented as follows:

Original text Students’ translation Suggested version

"Pin đại dương sinh học The oceanic biomass “The mini oceanic
thu nhỏ được lấy cảm battery is inspired by the biological battery is
hứng từ các hệ sinh thái microorganisms of inspired by the marine
vi sinh vật biển", tác giả microorganisms," said microorganism
chính Zhu Huawei từ Zhu Huawei's main ecosystem.” - said Zhu
Phòng thí nghiệm Trọng authorization from the Huawei, Chief author at
điểm Nhà nước Trung Chinese government's The Key Laboratory of
Quốc về Tài nguyên Vi focus on microbial Microbiological
sinh vật, cho biết resources Resources Chinese

Errors with unclear meaning were common for a variety of reasons, one of which
is probably because students struggle to select the right term for translation.

● Terminology:

Up to 47 cases of misuse terminologies were identified. Among those, common

terminological errors follow are displayed:

Source text Students’ translation Suggested version

Phòng thí nghiệm Trọng Chinese government's The Key Laboratory of
điểm Nhà nước Trung focus on microbial Microbiological
Quốc về Tài nguyên Vi resources Resources Chinese
sinh vật
13
 vi khuẩn lam lammaphyer cyanobacteria

Terminology was also a big difficulty for students. As these students are only in
their second year, the lack of terminology understanding was quite reasonable.

2. The analysis of the interview

In the interview, research subjects S1, S2, and S3 demonstrated difficulty while
choosing the appropriate phrases. S3 shared:

Due to the limited time to translate the text, most of the words I use are the
ones that come to mind first. I don't have much time to be sure if it matches
and means the same as the original text. For example, I wrote “are at an
all-time high” instead of “at a level never seen before”, and “trade”
instead of “commercial”....

Correspondingly, S1, S2 reported, “I used “occurred” instead of “broke out”,

“organic material” – “organic matter”, “oceanic creatures” – “marine” and so
many, many others”.

As revealed by S2, “I find expression the most challenging part in translating any
text from Vietnamese into English. I don’t have enough language to express myself
naturally in English.” Similarly, S1 said, “I am not satisfied with my translation.
Sometimes I am confused and use words that have non-equivalent meaning or
unnecessary words to translate text and that makes the meaning of the sentence
difficult to understand and coherence.”

3. Discussion

Possible causes:
During the interview, the students were also asked about the cause of their
mistakes. Each student has an explanation for their translation errors, and in
general, we can identify the following causes:

14
 - They haven't yet mastered English, so they struggle to translate many
Vietnamese expressions into English;
- Being influenced by Vietnamese thought processes makes it challenging to
translate Vietnamese to English.
- It's possible that the English vocabulary they previously learnt from the
Internet was erroneous, which would result in improper translation.
4. Summary

The findings in this chapter show the current situation of errors and difficulties
encountered by students during the translation process.

Through the research, the students’ reflection documents revealed the ability to
translate Vietnamese - English text of the sophomore at Hanoi Pedagogical
University 2. Thereby the cause of the issue is found and it will help in the process
of improving the level of translation of students.

15
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
1. Common errors made by second-year students
According to qualitative research, pupils were most challenged by non-equivalent
word choices when it came to linguistic mistakes. Non-equivalent word selections
earned the highest percentage when the document survey was analysed (33,4),
indicating that all students felt this was a significant barrier to writing for them.
More notably, language mistakes were likewise the most frequent ones among
second-year level students as seen from the perspective of students in S1, S2, and
S3, demonstrating the consistency and dependability of the findings from the
instruments. Additionally, the instruments all agreed that students needed to spend
more time working on grammatical elements including articles, punctuation,
prepositions, and single and plural forms.
Similarly, students constantly identified unclear expressions as the biggest issue.
The document survey found that, with the second-highest proportion of 25,7,
obscure phrases were by far the most common mistakes made by pupils. It is
therefore easy to draw the conclusion that pupils have the most trouble
understanding complex statements.

2. Suggestions for improving students’ performance

The survey and interview results were used to make recommendations for 2nd-year
English majors. Enhancing grammar and vocabulary is of utmost importance for
improving language proficiency. With adequate grammar and vocabulary, second-
year students may successfully explain the concepts of their target texts, process
information more quickly, and avoid using ambiguous language. The enrichment
of language competence is not a matter of days or weeks but a practice of a
lifetime; thus, it is vital for students to enhance language competence on a daily
basis. Translation is more acute than the typical practise of writing skills since it
needs pupils to record and express specifics like terminology, the author's tone,
naturalness, and other subtleties with precise precision. Thus, vocabulary is
unquestionably a crucial component. Additionally, it is crucial to establish a sense
of language to counteract the detrimental effects of the mother tongue while
translating from Vietnamese to English.
Similarly, background knowledge enrichment contributes significantly to the
success of translators. It is also necessary to carry out everyday baseline
knowledge enlargement. Background knowledge represents our glimpse of the
world. Our world continuously changes and evolves; we must thus constantly
update our knowledge and comprehension of it. by reading books on numerous
16
topics and keeping up with current events by reading books, journals, magazines,
and newspapers. Additionally, it is "a must" for students to learn about the kind of
texts they will be translating, just like a cook must fully evaluate the ingredients.
There are many different forms of texts, such as narrative, descriptive,
argumentative, and so on. Each kind has distinctive characteristics that call for
students to use the right vocabulary (formal or casual language), tone, and register.
In summary, the techniques suggested in this part have been proposed by both
participants and researcher. Some of them were even considered to be very useful
tools in addressing students’ translation errors. So as to truly master these
techniques, students need persistent practice and constant efforts to enhance their
language competence and knowledge.

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