NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS ENGLISH VU THUY TIEN ASTUDY ON THE DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING ENGLISH-VIETNAMESE IDIOMS IN BUSINESS DOCUMENTS OF BUSINESS ENGLISH STUDENTS - NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY Hanoi, May, 2020 NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS ENGLISH VU THUY TIEN ASTUDY ON THE DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING ENGLISH-VIETNAMESE IDIOMS IN BUSINESS DOCUMENTS OF BUSINESS ENGLISH STUDENTS - NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY Supervisor: Tran Thi Thu Giang, MBA Hanoi, May, 2020 Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Foremost, I would like to express my great appreciation to my advisor, Ms. Tran Thi Thu Giang, MBA for her valuable guidance, encouragement and careful and detailed comments from the preparation to the completion of this research. In addition, I would like to thank all fourth year Business English students for the cooperation in answering my questionnaire and helping me in this research’s process. Last but not least, my sincere thank goes to my family: my parents and my sister for always support me unconditionally.
Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Idiom is a type of vocabulary that various Business English students in National Economics University find difficult to convey its meaning from source language to targeted language. The difficulties come from both external and internal effects. Some main difficulties as well as its strategies will be shown in the research: “The difficulties in translating idioms from English to Vietnamese in Business documents of Business English students” below. The conclusion that BE students do encounter from problems while translating idioms in Business documents is based on data supplied by a survey of 60 fourth year students in Faculty of Foreign Department — NEU, personal interviews with five specific students and professional literature.
Analysis of the data can be divided into four main points: 1. The awareness of BE’s students about idioms: The majority of students are aware of the importance of idioms in Business Writing. However, there are some students who do not know exactly what idioms mean and still confuse idioms with other types of vocabulary. The awareness of BE’s students about translating idioms: Most of the BE students translate given business topic sentences that contain an idiom correctly.
Nonetheless, few still struggle with pure or semi idioms. The difficulties that BE students encounter when translating idiom: There are four main difficulties will be mentioned: recognizing idioms, understanding their meaning, finding exactly phrase and paraphrasing. 100% of BE students who participating in the survey agree that they have encountered at least one of the four difficulties in translating idioms. Each type of difficulty has a different frequency of encountering.
The reason why they are facing these difficulties: There are three reasons given to this problem: lack of idioms’ knowledge, lack of business knowledge and culture difference. Based on these findings, there are two sides of solutions to deal with difficulties: three from outside: reading, listening and using idioms and two from inside: guess the meaning from context and getting support translator tools. However, there still exists various ways to dealing with translating idioms’ problems. Each student will find a unique way which fit them best to deal with their own.
Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A 1 Business English 2 |NEU National Economics University LIST OF TABLES Name of table 10 English sentences taken from business articles and their Vietnamese translations LIST OF FIGURES The answer of idioms' definition of 10 students having the neutral option in the idioms' role The number of sentences which are able to translate among 10 sentences given The frequency of using each method when translating idioms of BE students BE students evaluate their own ability to translate idioms in Business documents (on the scale of 100) in Business documents from English to Vietnamese BE students’ assessment on the degree of difficulties in translating idioms from English to Vietnamese in Business context Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A TABLE OF CONTENT INTRODUCTION 1 1. Introduction of the organization — Faculty of Foreign Language, National Economics University 1 1. Introduction of the study 2.6 Design CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 1. Summary —NN¬M&S CHAPTER 2: ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS ¬¬ 1.
Business English students’ awareness towards Idioms 17 1.1 BE students’ awareness about the definition of idiom 17 1.2 BE students’ evaluation about the importance of idiom in Business context 18 2. Business English students’ awareness in translating idioms in Business documents 19 2.1 The ability to translate idiom of BE students 21 2.2 BE students’ method when translate idioms in Business documents 23 2.3 BE students evaluate their own ability to translate idioms from English to Vietnamese in Business documents 24 Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A 3. The difficulties which BE students come up with while translating idioms in Business documents from English to Vietnamese 25 3.1 The frequency of students encountering difficulties when translating idioms in Business documents 25 3.2 The assessment of students on the degree of each difficulty 26 4. Main reasons explaining why students encounter problems when translating idioms in Business documents from English to Vietnamese.
27 CHAPTER 3: RECOMMENDATIONS 30 CONCLUSION 32 REFERENCES APPENDIX 1. Raw data Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A INTRODUCTION 1. Introduction of the organization — Faculty of Foreign Language, National Economics University 1.1 History The precursor of the Faculty of Foreign Languages was the Department of English — Russian. Earlier, the foreign language organizations (Russian, Chinese, English and French) was formed and developed from the early 1970s.
The Faculty of Foreign Language was established on November 26, 2003. It is one of the young units with a fast and sustainable development history of National Economics University.2 Mission The main mission of the Faculty of Foreign Language is to train foreign language for fulltime students, English for students of Business English, English for students in Advanced Educational Programs and Vietnamese for foreign students (Overseas students). Faculty of Foreign Language is also in charge of strengthening foreign language training for students of cooperative training programs such as International Bachelor Program, Master's Program in Insurance Valuation. This is the unit which prepares exam for graduate students and other key university programs such as the Advanced Financial Program and the Excellent Educational Program in some departments.3 Structure The organizational structure of Faculty of Foreign Language is as follow: e Faculty Board consists of Dean and Vice Dean.
e The majors involve Head, Deputy Head, and Lecturers. e The Office board contains assistants.4 Key issue While working as an intern in Faculty of Foreign Language, various experiences were gained in dealing with translation situations that during the time learning Translation subject students probably heard and understood the theory, but might not practice in the real documents. Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A First, different target readers require different uses of words. In case target readers are children and their parents, translators should not use too complicated words.
They might want to divide the long sentences into the short and clear one. On the other hand, in case target readers of Business articles are mostly people in their 30s, the term must be conveyed clearly and some complicated word cannot be omit because of their important role in documents. Second, Google Translate is not always right. It still exists some mistakes that students who learning translation should not depend on it completely.
When translating word, Google Translate work pretty good, but when putting a whole paragraph or a phrase, the situation now is different, especially in the case of idioms. For example the phase “lie in store” in the sentence “A 30 March report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development offers an early glimpse of what lies in store for emerging and developing economies.” (Joseph Stiglitz, 2020) refer to what happen next — “sap xay ra” in Vietnamese. However, Google Translated convey it into “nằm trong cửa hang” - the literal meaning of the word. Last but not least, a translator should have a basic knowledge about the field they choose to translate or else their translated documents will not in theirs best or they will feel a little bit difficult when completing the task.
For example, if translating about Business, there might be some words such as “big picture” or “corner the market” that if translator do not have Business basic knowledge or do not take time to learn, they might not give readers in targeted language a clear meaning about it. At the same time, there is a weakness during working that was found difficult to deal with right away by a great amount of Business English’s students. It took them some times to learn and put the ideas into words of targeted language. It is how to transfer the meaning of some idioms into targeted language in the smooth and appropriate way.
Sometimes translate words by words or explain the meaning of the idiom is not wrong, but students might face the problem in which the harmony or the metaphor in original document’s idiom is lost. Apparently students cannot avoid inaccuracies but should try their best to maintain the emotion of the original documents is necessary. Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A 2. Introduction of the study 2.1 Rationale Idiom is a part of phraseology units which appears frequently in both documents and real life’s conversation.
Therefore, learning and translating idiom is certainly important for every translator if they want to transfer documents into targeted language successfully. Sometimes idiom seems easy to translate and translators can give the meaning right away. However, there are times when translators might take even an hour to figure out the way to translate idiom’s meaning in appropriate manner in targeted language. In case of BE students in NEU who are learning translation, they might face with various problems when translating idiom.
Having a wide knowledge of idioms and the way translating it appropriately, many researches are carried out to clarify the problem. Some aspects of this problem have caught the attention of several researchers. conducted a study about the topic “About the definition, classification, and translation strategies of idioms.’’ Another side of the issue studied by Nguyen Thu Hanh and Nguyen Tien Long from Military Science Academy: “English Idioms containing human-body parts and their Vietnamese Equivalents: A case study of two English Novels and their Vietnamese translation versions.”’ Two students Amineh Adelnia and Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi wrote an article “Translation of Idioms: A Hard Task for the Translator” published on Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. By following those studies mentioned above, this topic is chosen to conduct an academic research in order to find and analyze information as well as statistic, and to work out the best way for students in BE of NEU to translate idioms from English to Vietnamese in Business documents effectively and successfully.2 Purposes The study is aimed at: e Helping BE students to have a clear vision about idiom, what it actually is and the important of it in expressing ideas.
e Investigating the difficulties that BE students encounter from transfer the meaning of idioms in Business documents from English to Vietnamese Vu Thuy Tien — 11165194 — Business English 58A e Giving some recommendations to deal with problems when translating idioms from English to Vietnamese in Business documents 2.3 Scope With the above aims, the research is limited to the exploration of difficulties encountered by the fourth Business English students in National Economics University who have mainly taken Translating course at school. It involves the participation of 60 fourth year B.E students who have mainly taken Translating course in school year 2019 — 2020.4 Research questions This document is conducted in order to answer three questions: “* What are the difficulties that BE students encounter when translating idioms in business context? s* Why are they facing these difficulties? s* Which factors would help improve translation of idioms? 2.