NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ENGLISH FOR BUSINESS DEPARTMENT LE THI THU TRANG A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING LEXICAL COLLOCATION IN BUSINESS CONTEXT FROM ENGLISH INTO VIETNAMESE OF BUSINESS ENGLISH SENIORS OF FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AT NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES ENGLISH FOR BUSINESS DEPARTMENT LE THI THU TRANG A STUDY ON DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING LEXICAL COLLOCATION IN BUSINESS CONTEXT FROM ENGLISH INTO VIETNAMESE OF BUSINESS ENGLISH SENIORS OF FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AT NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY Supervisor: Tran Thi Thu Giang, MBA Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT In order to accomplish this study, I would love to send my gratitude to the support of many people through this acknowledgement. Firstly, I would like to send the deepest appreciation and special thanks to my supervisor, Mrs. Tran Thi Thu Giang for her enthusiastic support and valuable guidance which encouraged me to fulfill this thesis step by step. Without her guidance and advice, I would not be able to accomplish this internship on time.
Secondly, I appreciate the effort of all the tutors at Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University for the valuable advice and knowledge. I have gained many things related to English major, translation skill especially about collocation. Thirdly, my classmates from class Business English Intake 58 substantially play an important role to support me in any circumstances though they have their work to do. I want to send my thanks to all of them who helped me do the survey for this study.
This contributed greatly to the results and findings of my thesis. Finally, words cannot tell how appreciated and thankful I am for the love, care and support from my close friends, my family and my darling, who always stay beside me. Thank you very much! Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study is conducted to reveal the Difficulties in translating lexical collocation from English into Vietnamese in Business context of Business English seniors of Faculty of Foreign Language at National Economics University. To find out the difficulties that BE seniors encounter, two forms of survey were conducted under questionnaire and interview.
For the questionnaire, the data was collected from 50 seniors of Faculty of Foreign Language at National Economics University. 10 out of 50 students took part in the interview. According to the survey, there are three main parts which can be identified: the awareness of students of lexical collocation; the ability of students to collocate words to form lexical collocation and translate them in business context from English into Vietnamese; the difficulties in translating lexical collocation of BE seniors. A clearer view of these parts will be revealed below: - Although most students aware of the definition of lexical collocation, there are some students confuse it with idiom and other type of word combination.
- There are 6 sentences which are equivalent with 6 types of lexical collocation in the test given in the questionnaire, students have to mark correctly and translate them. As a result, the sentences in which students mark correctly correspond with their ability to translate appropriately. - Based on the survey’s result, among five difficulties list in the questionnaire, there are three main difficulties that students have to face when translating lexical collocation in business context from English into Vietnamese: Marking lexical collocation; Conveying the deep meaning and feeling of the writers; Misinterpreting lexical collocation. - These difficulties in translating were caused by the following reason.
There are 4 steps to follow strictly to have a good version of target language translation. However, students take 2 or 3 steps in their translating process only. Giving recommendations for improving BE seniors’ ability to translate effectively is essential. Then they could overcome the difficulties and widen their knowledge to translate lexical collocation.
Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of abbreviations i List of tables ii List of figures iii INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study 2. Purpose of the study 3. Scope of the study 5.
The importance of the study 6. Data collection methods 6. Interview Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 7. Organization of the study 4 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 1.
Definition of translation 5 1. Definition of lexical collocation 8 2. Meanings of lexical collocation 9 2. A tendency to co-occurrence 9 2.
A combination of words 10 2. Types of lexical collocation 11 Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 2. Problems in translating lexical collocations 12 2. Conveying the deep meaning and feeling of source context 12 2.
Misinterpreting the meaning of a lexical collocation from the source context 13 2. Marking collocations in the source context 14 3. Summary of theoretical framework 14 CHAPTER 2: ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 1. Students’ awareness of lexical collocation 16 1.
Students’ awareness of the definition of lexical collocation 16 1. The evaluation of students for the importance of lexical collocation in Business context translation 17 2. Students’ ability to collocate and translate lexical collocation in business context from English into Vietnamese 18 2. The ability of students to collocate specific kinds of lexical collocation 18 Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 2.
Students’ sending back their translation 19 2. Students’ satisfaction with their translation of lexical collocation 22 3. The difficulties of BE seniors in translating lexical collocation in business context from English into Vietnamese 23 3. Students’ frequency facing the difficulties when translating lexical collocation 23 3.
The difficulties in translating lexical collocation 24 4. The reason of incomplete and incorrect translation of Business English seniors 26 5. Summary of difficulties and causes 27 CHAPTER 3: RECOMMENDATIONS 29 CONCLUSION 31 REFERENCES APPENDIX 1 APPENDIX 2 APPENDIX 3 Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS NEU National Economics University Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 LIST OF TABLES Table 1.Word combination as collocation Table 1.Types of Lexical Collocations Table 2.The results of students’ translation Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.The percentage of students’ understanding of lexical collocation Figure 2.The importance of lexical collocation in students’ point of view Figure 2.Types of lexical collocation challenging students Figure 2.The proportion of students to translate lexical collocations in business context Figure 2.The proportion of students’ ability to translate correctly Figure 2.The degree of students’ satisfaction with their translating lexical collocation Figure 2.The frequency of students’ facing difficulties in translating lexical collocation Figure 2.The number of students facing difficulties when translating lexical collocation Figure 2.The steps students followed to accomplish translation Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the study In the current globalization trend of the world, English has become an indispensable tool in helping people to communicate freely with others and bringing them closer together.
Moreover, English is the most common language since nearly 60 countries use it as main language, beside mother tongue and almost 100 countries use English as the second language. Therefore, English plays an important role in this global integration today. The development of English is the basis for Vietnamese students finding job opportunities in many fields, especially in translation industry. At the same time, through business networking activities held regularly at the school, students also have many chances to practice and practice communication skills, translation-interpreting skills in particular.
Translation focuses on preparing and gaining knowledge, skills and essential quality for students’ future occupation. Since the relationships between Vietnam and other countries are developing, translation becomes one of the most important tools to connect people from all over the world. It also helps students satisfy the demand of English-Vietnamese translation or Vietnamese-English translation in different fields such as politics, culture, education, commerce, technology and so on. In this technology era, there are corporations like Google, Microsoft that can build up tools supporting translation like Google Translates, Trip Lingo, iTranslate, SayHi, SDL Trados, and so on.
However, these tools have some restrictions in keeping the writers’ fully meanings. Therefore, students are able to improve individual and technical understandings. Translation is a difficult process due to the knowledge in each field requirement and ability of translators’ skill. In Business context, lexical collocation plays an important role for the full meanings and expressions of writers.
However, translating it for Business English seniors at National Economics is quite challenging. Therefore, a number of mistakes were made in translating process. This will lead to awkward version of translation of target language. All these things forces me to do the research to help Business English students have a better understanding and gain more knowledge of lexical collocation and how to translate it correctly.
Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 2. Purpose of the study This study’s objectives is to help Business English students of Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University evaluate their ability to translate lexical collocation from English into Vietnamese in Business context. The difficulties in translating will be revealed, so the students will be able to point out which skill they need to improve and the reason why their translation result is unacceptable. Relying on that, they can look for the effective methods of translating lexical collocation through this study’s recommendation.
Research questions There are two questions in which this study will discuss clearly (1) What difficulties in translating lexical collocation in Business context do Business English seniors most often face with? (2) What should Business English seniors do to tackle the difficulties in translating lexical collocation in business context? 4. Scope of the study The study focuses on analyzing 50 Business English seniors of Faculty of Foreign Languages at National Economics University about their ability to translate lexical collocations in Business context. Then finding out the difficulties and giving recommendations to overcome it is very essential. The students participate in doing the survey which included 9 questions and interviewing for practical result.
The importance of the study This study is to determine whether Business English seniors can understand or translate lexical collocations correctly or not. Despite the same meaning, there is the combination of word which is unchangeable. This means that just a few verbs, nouns, adverb, adjectives that collocate with one certain word. Having wide knowledge of English collocations would help Business English seniors master English and use it more naturally and flexibly.
Through this study, Business English seniors will be able to mark the lexical collocation and translate correctly each type Lê Thị Thu Trang — 11165373 — Business English 584 of lexical collocation in their own expression without losing the deep feeling and meaning of writer in the source language. Data collection methods 6. Questionnaire In order to collect realistic results from each individual of Business English seniors, a survey was designed and sent to 50 students with the hope that it will be advantageous for this study. In this survey, there are 9 questions in total with multiple-choice answer and freely filling in the blank which was given.
Among seven questions, there are two tests to evaluate the student’s ability and knowledge of lexical collocation and translation skill. The first test is marking the letter A, B or C to indicate the most acceptable collocation. For the answers of each sentence, all three answers are synonyms. This means that in terms of meaning they are the same.
However, only one answer is correct since just one of them can be collocated with the word given in the sentence. The second test is translating all the collocations that students’ have found above. Based on the result of translation, the difficulties will be shown. At that point, once they know the problems, the reasons and recommendations are not the obstacles at all.