THUONGMAI UNIVERSITY ENGLISH FACULTY ------ GRADUATION PAPER DIFFICULTIES AND SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS IN TRANSLATING CONTRACTS OF HOANG HA INVESTMENT AND DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANCY CONSTRUCTION CO, LTD Supervisor: Le Thi Phuong Mai, M. Student: Nguyen Thi Ha Thanh Class: K50N6 Student’s number: 14D170394 Hanoi - 2018 Luan van HÀ NỘI - 2016 ABSTRACT Translation is a very important job for companies working with foreign partners. For the Hoang Ha Company, contract translation has become an essential part of the company's operations, as well as its image with its foreign counterparts. Since the language in the building is not easy and the contract requirements are very high, so the translation staff in the company encountered some difficulties in the translation process.
This study aims to find out the difficulties of translating the contracts of the company's translation staff so that translators can find solutions to overcome these difficulties to improve the quality. Besides that, this study also helps translators and students involved in contract translation understand the difficulties that arise during the translation process and to orient the correct translation method. In addition, the research methods used in this study are the questionnaire- a list of questions to find out the difficulties that students usually face and the interview questions which used to meeting students‟ expectations in learning the subject. i Luan van ACKNOWLEDGMENT In the process of completing this Graduation Paper, I have received a great deal of help, guidance and encouragement from my teachers and friends.
First of all, I would like to express my deepest thank to my supervisor, Mrs. Le Thi Phuong Mai , MA of Foreign Language Department, who has offered me suggestion on how to shape the study and always been most willing to give me valuable advice, helpful comments, corrected my graduation paper as well as inspired me with his helpful advice and ideas. I also would like to express my sincere thanks to all teachers in the Department of Foreign language, who have thoughtfully trained me in the last four years. Finally, as always I wish to express my special thanks to my family, my friends and my brother for their understanding and encouragement throughout the preparation of this paper.
This Graduation paper has been completed with my best knowledge. However, errors and mistakes are unavoidable because of my limited knowledge. Thus, I am looking forward to receiving the reflection, sympathy and contribution from teachers to make it more perfect. Ha Noi, April 2018 Student Nguyen Thi Ha Thanh ii Luan van TABLE OF CONTENT ABSTRACT.i TABLE OF CONTENT.iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.v LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.vi CHAPTER I: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY.3 Aims of the study.4 Scope of the study.6 Organization of the study.5 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW.
The theoretical background.1 Definitions of translation.2 The importance of translation.3 Types of translation. Some useful techniques for translation. The translation process. Difficulties in translation.
General knowledge on a foreign construction contract. Definition of a foreign construction contract. The main content of a foreign construction contract.24 iii Luan van CHAPTER III: FINDING AND DISCUSSION FROM STUDYING THE TRANSLATION AI THE HOANG HA COMPANY. An introduction of translation activities of the Hoang Ha Company.
The translation materials. Context of the study. Instruments for collecting data. Interviews with translation staffs.
Data collection procedure.37 CHAPTER IV: SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS TO OVERCOME THE DIFFICULTIES.39 CONCLUSION REFERENCES iv Luan van LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Acronyms Meaning in English Meaning in Vietnamese SL Source language Ngôn ngữ nguồn TL Target language Ngôn ngữ đích Co,Ltd Limited liability Công ty TNHH company v Luan van LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Diagram 2.1: Translation process by Roger T.1 : 7 questions in the interview Chart 3.1: Translation staffs s' attitude towards the importance of vocabulary Table 3.2: Ways of remembering English vocabulary on construction Chart 3. 2: Translator staffs ’ vocabulary difficulties vi Luan van CHAPTER I: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY 1.1 Rationale Along with the development of countries in the world and the trend of the international economic integration, English is considered to be one of the most popular languages in the world. In Vietnam, with the changes and the developments of the economy and society, as well as the implementation of the open- door policy, English has been used more and more widely both by the young and the old and it has been the most popular foreign language. English also occupied a specially important status in the development of international relationship in Vietnam.
Besides, our country is also innovating and developing in the period of industrialization and modernization. Many industrial parks are built together with the presence of modern high-rise buildings and urban areas. This development has led to increasing the demand for infrastructure. Thus, construction has become an independent and important business.
This is also a sector with stable development and attracts a lot of foreign investments. Moreover, the development of the construction industry beyond the national territory has led to the need to use English-the international language, as a bridge between domestic and foreign companies.Therefore, using English in transactions, contracts or direct negotiations is also very important. Because the contract is an agreement between companies through specific terms and expressions as the basis for the follow-up of companies, the conversion from English to Vietnamese and vice versa are high accuracies. In particular, in the construction industry, contracts involving the terms of quantity, quality or origin of materials need to be carefully drafted.
The terms in the construction industry also need to be correctly translated in both English and Vietnamese so that both internal and external partners can work together to avoid making mistakes in the construction process. Therefore, finding and researching practical contract translation in an actual company are very necessary. It will help us find out the difficulties, 1 Luan van propose solutions and support companies and individuals to improve their translation skills. That is the main reason inspiring me to carry out this topic.
More importantly, thanks for studying this topic, I have a chance to have the thorough understanding of the translation of construction contracts.2 Previous studies With regard to the subject of translation, there are now a lot of documents and articles on this subject. Each researcher has his own translation study and draws his own conclusions. To get a good quality graduation paper, I have searched and consulted a lot of documents and related research in both Vietnamese and English. The first book I referred to is Nida and Taber (1982), attempting to give a more “scientific” sense to translation.
Borrowing theoretical concepts from semantics and pragmatics, and being influenced by Chomsky‟s generative- transformational grammar (1965), Nida adopts a more systematic approach to exploring the field of translation studies. With regard to equivalence, Nida maintains that there are two basic types of equivalence: formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. In particular, Nida argues that in formal equivalence the target text resembles very much the source text in both form and content whereas in dynamic equivalence an effort is made to convey the source text message in the target text as naturally as possible. It could be argued that Nida is in favour of dynamic equivalence since he considers it to be a more effective translation procedure.
This comes as no surprise given the fact that Nida was, at the time at which he proffered his views about equivalence, translating the Bible, and hence trying to produce the same impact on various different audiences he was simultaneously addressing. This paper would have been incomplete without reference to Peter Newmark, one of the founders of the Institute of Linguists and a fervent advocate for the professionalization of translators. Peter Newmark (1988) does not aim to promote any monolithic translation theory but rather attempt to describe a basis for dealing with problems encountered during the 2 Luan van translation process. More specifically, Newmark replaces Nida‟s terms of formal and dynamic equivalence with semantic and communicative translation respectively.
The major difference between the two types of translation proposed by Newmark is that semantic translation focuses on meaning whereas communicative translation concentrates on effect. In other words, semantic translation looks back at the source text and tries to retain its characteristics as much as possible. Its nature is more complex, detailed and there is also a tendency to over-translate. On the other hand, communicative translation looks towards the needs of the addressees, thus trying to satisfy them as much as possible.
In this respect, communicative translation tends to under-translate; to be smoother, more direct and easier to read. Hence, in semantic translation, a great emphasis is placed on the author of the original text whereas communicative translation is meant to serve a larger readership. It should be pointed out that during the translation process, communicative translation need not be employed exclusively over semantic or vice versa. It may well be the case in a literary text that a particular sentence requires communicative translation whereas another sentence from the same text may require a semantic one.
Hence, the two methods of translation may be used in parallel, with varying focuses where each is employed. In addition, the knowledge from Baker's book is also very important. Mona Baker in her influential book (1992) addresses the vexing issue of equivalence by adopting a more neutral approach when she argues that equivalence is a relative notion because it is influenced by a variety of linguistic and cultural factors (p. In particular, the chapters of her book are structured around different kinds of equivalence, that is, at the level of word, phrase, grammar, text and pragmatics.
Hence, terms such as grammatical, textual and pragmatic equivalence come up. In more detail, a distinction is made between word-level and above-world level equivalence. Adopting a bottom-up approach, Baker acknowledges the importance of individual words during the translation process, since the translator looks firstly at the words as single units in order to find their equivalent in the target language. Baker goes 3 Luan van on to provide a definition of the term word referring to its complex nature since a single word can sometimes be assigned different meanings in different languages.
Consequently, parameters such as number, gender and tense should be taken into consideration when translating a word (p. Grammatical equivalence refers to the diversity of grammatical categories across languages and the difficulty of finding an equivalent term in the target text due to the variety of grammatical rules across languages. In fact, she stresses that differences in grammatical structures may significantly change the way the information or message is carried across. As a consequence, the translator may be forced to add or delete information in the target text because of the lack of specific grammatical categories.
Some of the major categories that often pose problems for translators are number, voice, person, gender, tense and aspect. On the other hand, textual equivalence refers to equivalence that may be achieved between a source text and target text in terms of cohesion and information. Baker argues that the feature of texture is of immense importance for the translators since it facilitates their comprehension and analysis of the source text and helps them to produce a cohesive and coherent text in the target text. Moreover, I also refer to other studies of translation from other books such as by Roger T.
This book derives from a feeling of considerable unease and puzzlement about the way translation has been treated, over a substantial period, by translation theorists on the one hand and linguists on the other. The translation theorists, almost without exception, 1 have made little systematic use of the techniques and insights of contemporary linguistics (the linguistics of the last twenty years or so) and the linguists, for their part, have been at best neutral and at worst actually hostile to the notion of a tl1eory of translation. In addition, Alan K. Melby ( 1995) gave me a general knowledge of translation difficulties, which helped me to perfect the main subject of this paper.