The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which the typological differences between Vietnamese and English influence the process of translating authentic Vietnamese sentences into English through an error analysis of the Vietnamese-English translations by Vietnamese EFL students. It starts with the assumption that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language and the basic structure of Vietnamese manifests a topic-comment relation, rather than a subject-predicate relation (Thompson, 1987; Dyvik, 1984; Hao, 1991; Rosén, 1998), and tries to find out whether the students are more likely to make more errors when the topic of the sentence is not identical with the grammatical subject. This study also investigates the most common types of errors Vietnamese students make when translating topic-comment structures from Vietnamese into English. The analysis focuses on the errors made when translating the dropped subject and empty elements of Vietnamese. This is important, given the fact that the grammatical subject is always required in English, but not in Vietnamese. The data was collected from 95 students of English translation classes in their first, second, third, and fourth years in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Using an error analysis technique often adopted in studying the deviated forms produced by second language learners (James, 1998; Richards, 1974; Corder, 1974), the study constructs an error corpus in the form of a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet and classifies all the errors based on the categories they belong to (linguistic, comprehension or translational) and the kind of deviation they are (addition, omission, misordering or misselection, etc). The study establishes a taxonomy of errors, which includes three main categories: linguistic errors, comprehension errors and translation errors. The results of the study suggest a number of potential errors students are prone to making when translating the topic-comment structure of Vietnamese into English, and provides some practical guidelines for teachers, so that they can help students deal with these types of errors in Vietnamese-English translations. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/212752 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Na, Pham Phu Quynh, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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