NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ENGLISH FOR BUSINESS DEPARTMENT A STUDY ON THE DIFFICULTIES THAT BUSINESS ENGLISH STUDENTS FACE WHEN TRANSLATING MARKETING MATERIALS IN THE PERIOD FROM 2018 TO 2020 Hanoi, May 2020 NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ENGLISH FOR BUSINESS DEPARTMENT LUU NHAT VY A STUDY ON THE DIFFICULTIES THAT BUSINESS ENGLISH STUDENTS FACE WHEN TRANSLATING MARKETING MATERIALS IN THE PERIOD FROM 2018 TO 2020 Supervior: Tran Thi Thu Giang, MBA Hanoi, May 2020 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First and foremost, I would like to thank my instructor, Ms. Tran Thi Thu Giang, for giving me her sincere advice and superb knowledge to undertake this research study, persevere and complete it. She has offered conscientious guidedances, which has given me huge inspiration and suggestions in my quest for solving research questions. While silently following every step of this study, she, at the same time, has given me free space to develop my own thoughts and proactively pursue my research.
Without imposing any ideas on my research, she ensures that I stay on course and do not get sidetracked from the thesis. Without her insightful counsel, this thesis would never have been possible. I want to express my deep appreciation for my family who has given me a great source of motivation and strength in my journey to complete this study. Thanks to this support, I am able to do my best in a research that I independently lead and conduct from the beginnng till the end.
I am forever grateful for their unconditional support. I would like to thank my fellows from Business English Intake 58 and students from Business English Intake 59 for spending their precious time taking part in in-depth interviews and answering questionaires. The down-to-earth data that they provided me has been the foundation for findings and analysis in the completetion of this thesis. Since most of the information exchanges are offline due to the recent pandemic, receiving this enthusiastic cooperation is an unexpected but great and meaningful surprise.
I want to acknowledge my gratitude to all the lecturers in Faculty of Foreign Languages for their valuable lessons. Their English lexicology, grammar, skill, culture courses have facilitated me to finish this thesis with high level of linguistic accuracy in every aspect. Last but not least, I am grateful to my classmates in translation team who would stay up around the clock to share the most updated informmation related to this thesis. I sincerely value these awesome individuals as great contributors to the success of this thesis and source of inspiration that keep me stay strong and motivated throughout the past four months.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The study is aimed at providing some insights into the difficulties that Business English students at National Ecnomics University face when translating Marketing materials in the perioid from 2018 to 2020. More specifically, it hopes to clarifying some difficulties that students face when translating Marketing terms and Advertising slogans. It follows a research methodology including the research procedure, data collection method, and tools supporting analyzing data. The entire procedure of the study is illustrated by the following diagram: To answer the research questions, the study is aimed to clarfy three issues: Students’ awareness, their difficulties in translating Marketing terms and their difficulties in translating Advertising slogans.
The study has found that of 100 students majoring in Business English at National Economics University, there are 89% students seniors and 11% juniors, rendering the discrepancy in their awareness of the problem. 99% _ students reported to have problems with translating Marketing terms and Advertising slogans. With each of the three issues, students struggle with vocabulary problem, grammar problem, lack of knowledge about Marketing terms and Advertising slogans and the challenge of following the criteria of Communicative translation method and Translation process’s procedure. All of these will be discussed later in the chapter of Findings and Analysis.
Based on the findings, the study proposes several recommendations which students can apply to improve their translation skills according to each difficulty. List of abbreviations Source language SL Target language TL Semantic translation ST Communicative translation CT List of tables Table 5. Three biggest problems that students face when translating a Marketing term from English to Vietnamese List of figures Figure 1. Communicative translation (Newmark, 2001) 7 Figure 2.
Translation procedures (Albasyouni, 2019) 8 Figure 3. The proportion of survey participants 15 Figure 4. The proportion of third-year students with difficulties in translating Marketing terms & slogans 16 Figure 6. Exerpts from articles featured on BrandsVietnam 19 Figure 7.
Four greatest obstacles that students face when translating Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English 20 Figure 8. Common vocabulary barriers that you face when translating Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English 21 Figure 9. Common grammar barriers that students face when translating Advertising slogans from Vietnamese to English 24 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3 List of abbreviations 5 List of tables 6 List of figures 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS 8 1. Introduction of the research topic 12 2.
Research questions 13 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION OF THE ORGANIZATION WITH THEIR ISSUES 15 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 17 2. Source language and Target language 17 2. The translation method used for translating marketing texts 17 2. Definition of marketing and advertising terms 21 2.
Advertising slogans 22 CHAPTER 3: ANALYSIS AND FINDING 24 3. The awareness of third-year and final-year students of their difficulties in translating Marketing terms and slogans 24 3. Students’ difficulties in translating Marketing terms 29 3. Lack of exposure to the terms 30 3.
Limited Vietnamese equivalent vocabulary 31 3. Fidelity in translation 31 3. Students’ difficulties in translating Advertising slogans 32 3. Preservation of original meaning together with its marketing effect on readers 35 3.
Other reasons 37 CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDATIONS 38 4. Recommendations for improving Marketing term translation 38 4. Keeping a Marketing dictionary 38 4. Refering to Marketing textbooks 39 4.
Recommendations for improving slogan translation from Vietnamese to English 39 4. Developing the mindset of a Marketer 40 4. Improving English expression ability 41 CONCLUSION 42 1. Summary of the major findings 42 __2.
Suggestions for further research 43 REFERENCES 45 Appendix: Raw data 46 I. Interview questions (30 participants) 46 II. Introduction of the research topic At National Economics University, students majoring in Business English at National Economics University take translation courses in their third and final school year. While students are exposed to materials in a wide range of fields such as economics, trade, banking and finance, they encounter significant difficulties when doing translation related to Marketing, in particular Marketing terms and Advertising slogans.
This reduces the quality of their translation work significantly and prevents them from being excellent translators in Marketing. 2018-2020 is the period during which third-year and final year students increase their workload with Marketing terms and Advertising slogans. At the same time, marketing has become increasingly important in business development, especially in the Fourth Industrial Revolution when digital media thrives. As a result, it is important that Business English students improve their translation skills in the field of marketing if they choose the follow the career path of a translator in the future.
As far as translating marketing terms and advertising slogans are concerned, there have not many papers focusing on the difficulties that Business English students in National Economics University face. This study is aimed at elaborating the difficulties that the students of Intake 58 and 59 encounter in the period from 2018 to 2020 and proposing recommendations to help them overcome the obstacles. Rationales Due to the lack of papers related to the topic, there is an urgent need to have an academic study which can give an insight into Business English students’ difficulties in translating marketing terms and advertising slogans. After that, students can have an idea where their difficulties come from.
Another reason why I conduct this paper is to analyze the difficulties systematically and help students to figure out methods to translate better. What are the difficulties that students majoring in Business English face when translating marketing terms? 3. What are the difficulties that students majoring in Business English face when Advertising slogans? 3. What should be done to overcome these difficulties? 4.
Scope of the research The study will be conducted with students majoring in Business English of two intakes: 58 and 59. This is based on the level of their awareness of the difficulties, because students with different exposure to marketing terms and edvertising slogans have different perspectives. In details, the study consists of 3 weeks examining related papers and other reliable sources, 3 week conducting in-depth interviews, 3 week on questionairs including two quick tests and 7 weeks processing the papers. Method of collecting data s* Data collection techniques In the study, in-depth interviews and survey questionnaire are carried out to find out what the difficulties that students encounter.
s* In-depth interview Students majoring in Business English of Intake 58 and 59 are directly interviewed. Their answers are received then to provide data and information for the paper. The purpose of interview is to find out whether students are aware of their difficulties and in case students recognize the difficulties, do they have motivation to improve their translation skills. “* Questionnaire The students are given questionnaire with logical questions related to research topic to collect data.
The questionaire is published under the digital Google form to be convenient for students. s* Data analysys techniques In the study, qualitative data analysis is used to elaborate students’ difficulties. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION OF THE ORGANIZATION WITH THEIR ISSUES The study’s core problem revolves around students’ difficulties in translating Marketing terms and Advertising slogans in Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University. Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University was established in 2003.
For almost two decades, the faculty has been providing teaching and training program to students majoring in Business English. Unlike other colleges and universities in Vietnam such as Hanoi University, Vietnam National University or Hanoi University of Technology, Faculty of Foreign Languages design their undergraduate courses to equip students with expertise and knowledge that later enable them to launch a career in Business and Economics. Accordingly, students are expected to use English with a high level of proficiency in both verbal and both verbal and non verbal communication. The 5 core pillars of Business English undergraduate program at National Economics University is English skills, English used in Business, Translation and Interpretation, Fundamentals of Business Administration, Linguistic theory and Second languages (Chinese or French).
For Translation & Intepretation, students must complete academic translation courses in their third and fourth year as part of the curriculum requirement. Along with selected materials that students receive from lecturers, they also have to create their own Portfolio in which they find, choose and translate documents by themselves. One feature of requisite materials that Faculty of Foreign Languages include in their translation courses is that the materials span all areas with the focus on Business. This means that students are exposed to documents in Commerce & Trade, Economics, Information Technology, Journalism, and Marketing.
In-depth interviews show that a great number of students have great difficulties in translating Marketing materials, especially Marketing terms and slogans. Translating Marketing terms and slogans requires students to equip themselves with background knowledge and understanding about the field such the field, just like any other fields. What makes it different is that, to produce a high-quality translation work, students do not necessarily align with precision like what they have to when translating STEM or Finance or Economics documents, but rather, they have to be flexible enough to convey a good marketing effect on readers while sustaining the original meaning of source language. This leaves much room for English proficiency and students’ creativity to come up with good translation that exert the leverage that companies want to do over readers, who now can be called Customers.
After all, marketing contents are created to serve companies’s intentions.