MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY LÊ THỊ NGỌC THẢO GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN “THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS” BY KENNETH GRAHAME AND THEIR EQUIVALENTS IN GOOGLE TRANSLATE’S VIETNAMESE TRANSLATIONS FIELD: English Linguistics CODE: 8.01 Supervisor: LÊ NHÂN THÀNH, Ph. BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN LÊ THỊ NGỌC THẢO LIÊN KẾT NGỮ PHÁP TRONG “GIÓ QUA RẶNG LIỄU” CỦA KENNETH GRAHAME VÀ TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG TRONG BẢN DỊCH TIẾNG VIỆT CỦA GOOGLE TRANSLATE Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh Mã số: 8.01 Người hướng dẫn: TS. LÊ NHÂN THÀNH i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I confirm that the thesis “Grammatical cohesion in “The Wind in the Willow” by Kenneth Grahame and their equivalents in Google Translate’s Vietnamese Translations” is my work except where reference is made in the text of the thesis. No other person’s work has been used without acknowledgement in the thesis.
This thesis has not been submitted elsewhere for the award of any degree or diploma. Binh Dinh, 2021 Lê Thị Ngọc Thảo ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was completed with the support of many people. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Le Nhan Thanh, my supervisor, for his patience, guidance and professional advice during the process of completing this thesis.
Without his expertise and encouragement, I would not have been able to finish this study. I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to all my lecturers who have taken part in my MA course at Quy Nhon University and provided me with useful and interesting knowledge and experience as well as their inspiration which helped me conduct my research. Last but not least, I feel deeply indebted to my family members for their support and motivation whenever I needed to finish the thesis. iii ABSTRACT The study aims to examine the quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of the grammatical cohesive devices in “The Wind in the Willow” by Kenneth Grahame in terms of translation errors.
To fulfil this aim, 10934 reference ties and 770 conjunction ties found in 2306 English sentences containing the references and conjunctions in “The Wind in the Willow” and their equivalents in GT’s Vietnamese translations were examined to classify the translation errors in the Vietnamese translations in terms of grammatical cohesion using Costa et al. The research employs both quantitative and qualitative content analysis in this study to collect data and analyze it to answer the research questions. The results of the study show that GT cannot achieve accuracy in translating the references with contextual meaning and GT shows better quality in translating the conjunctions than the references. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP.
vii LIST OF TABLES. ix LIST OF FIGURES. Aim and Objectives. Scope of the Study.
Significance of the Study. Organization of the Study. The Theory of Cohesion. Definition of cohesion.
Errors in translation. Definition of translation errors. Classification of translation errors. Overview of Google Translate.
Previous studies on Google Translate. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. References and Conjunctions in “The Wind in the Willows” and their Equivalents in GT’s Vietnamese Translations. Types of references.
Types of conjunctions. Types of Translation Errors. No translation errors. The Quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of English Grammatical Cohesive Devices.
Summary of the main Findings. Limitation of the Study. Implication of the Study. Implication for teachers and students of translation.
Implication for translators. Suggestions for Future Research. 95 APPENDICES vii ABBREVIATIONS (a) Abbreviation Abbreviation Definition C.ad Conjunction: additive C.av Conjunction: adversative C.ca Conjunction: causal C.te Conjunction: temporal DE Discourse errors DER Discourse errors of references GE Grammar errors GEC Grammar errors of conjunctions GER Grammar errors of references GT Google Translate LE Lexis errors LEC Lexis errors of conjunctions LER Lexis errors of references MT Machine translation NMT Neural machine translation OE Orthographic errors OEC Orthographic error of conjunctions OER Orthographic error of references R.co Reference: comparative R.de Reference: demonstrative R.pe Reference: personal SE Semantic errors SEC Semantic errors of conjunctions viii SER Semantic errors of references SMT Statistical machine translation (b) Conventions In the text: ITALICS are used for emphasis, examples or technical terms; BOLD words are used to mark the first use of technical terms. In numbered examples: BOLD and UNDERLINED words in examples are the features under discussion.
ix LIST OF TABLES Number Names of tables Page Table 2.1 Comparative Reference Items 15 Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Additive Table 2.2 18 Type Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Table 2.3 34 Adversative Type Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Causal Table 2.4 23 Type Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Temporal Table 2.6 Error Categories 35 Table 2.7 The Framework for the Analysis of Reference Items 37 Table 2.8 The Framework for the Analysis of Conjunction 38 Table 2.9 Identifiable Characteristics of Translation Errors 41 Table 2.10 109 Languages Supported by Google Translate 45 The Sample Table on the Frequencies of Reference in Table 3.1 “The Wind in the Willow” and Their Equivalents in 60 Google Translate’s Vietnamese Translations The Sample Table on the Frequencies of Conjunction Table 3.2 in “The Wind in the Willow” and Their Equivalents in 61 Google Translate’s Vietnamese Translations The Sample Table on the Frequencies of Each Table 3.3 Translation Error Type of Grammatical Cohesive 62 Devices The Sample Table in Translation Errors committed by Table 3.4 Google Translate according to Grammatical Cohesive 63 Devices The Frequencies of Reference in “The Wind in the Table 4.1 Willow” and Their Equivalents in Google Translate’s 65 Vietnamese Translations x Number Names of tables Page The Occurrences of Conjunction in “The Wind in the Table 4.2 Willow” and Their Equivalents in GT’s Vietnamese 72 Translations The Frequencies of Each Error Type of Grammatical Table 4.3 Cohesive Devices in Google Translate’s Vietnamese 79 Translations The Number of Occurrences of the Four Kinds of the Table 4.4 80 Semantic Errors The Number of Occurrences of the Three Kinds of Table 4.5 83 Lexis Errors The Number of Occurrences of the Three Kinds of the Table 4.6 84 Orthographic Errors Translation Errors committed by GT according to Table 4.7 87 Grammatical Cohesive Devices xi LIST OF FIGURES Number Names of figures Page Figure 2.1 Exophoric and Endophoric Reference 9 Figure 2.2 Google Translate Graphical User Interface 47 Figure 3.1 The Interface of Word 2010 with the Navigation Pane 58 Translation Errors committed by GT according to Figure 4.1 88 Grammatical Cohesive Devices 1 Chapter 1. Rationale Among subfields of discourse analysis, cohesion has received a lot of special attention from linguists and researchers such as Halliday (1964), Hasan (1968), Gleason (1968), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Gutwinski (1976), Martin (1992), and many others. Although there are a lot of models of cohesion, the framework suggested by Halliday and Hasan (1976) in Cohesion in English has been considered as the most influential model of cohesion. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion refers to “the linguistic means whereby texture is achieved” (p.
In other words, cohesion in a text is used as a means to connect or relate one sentence to the text semantically so that it is understood. Therefore, many researchers have focused on cohesion of news, stories, reports, or editorials (Hameed, 2008; Hidayat, 2016; Sudani, Tika & Sudana, 2017, among others. However, only a few have studied and compared the grammatical cohesive devices in an English novel and their Vietnamese equivalents in Google Translate's translations. Fewer studies concern the study of evaluating the quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of the English novel in terms of the grammatical cohesive devices.
Google Translate (GT) is a popular tool for free online machine translation developed by Google and is regarded as a portable personal translator with millions of users in the world. It can translate multiple forms of texts and media such as words, phrases, websites, speech, and even moving images from one language into 109 other languages. Although GT has been improved a lot from statistical machine translation to neural machine translation to make better and accurate translations, it has still not been 2 perfect with some limitations. Therefore, a lot of researchers from different fields around the world have carried out many studies relating to GT.
For example, Aiken and Balan (2011) with the article An Analysis of Google Translate Accuracy, Patil and Davies (2014) in Use of Google Translate in medical communication: Evaluation of accuracy, Anggaira and Hadi (2017) with Linguistic Errors On Narrative Text Translation using Google Translate, Kol, Schcolnik, and Spector-Cohen (2018) in the article Google Translate in Academic Writing Courses, and Aiken with the article entitled An Updated Evaluation of Google Translate Accuracy (2019). In Vietnam, there are also some researches discussing GT such as Nguyen Minh Trang (2019) with Using Google Translate As a Pronunciation Training Tool and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Giau (2019) with her Master’s thesis named Evaluating the Quality of English – Vietnamese Translation carried out by Google Translate. I have been very interested in The Wind in the Willows, a children’s book by British novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Since its beginnings as a series of stories told to Kenneth Grahame’s young son, The Wind in the Willows has become one of the most favourite children’s books of all time.
The novel is about the adventures of four anthropomorphised animals - Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger, which have enchanted readers of all ages, especially children for more than a century. Since the first publication, Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece has been issued in over a hundred editions and translated into many languages. It can be read in Afrikaans as Die Wind in die Wilgers, in Italian as Il Vento nei Salici, in Finnish as Kaislikossa suhisee, in Portuguese as As Aventuras de Senhor Sapo and in dozens of other languages. This famous novel also has translations in verse, audio and video adaptations, plays, films, picture books, pop-up books, knitting patterns, graphic novels and scholarly annotated editions.
Therefore, The Wind in the 3 Willows by Kenneth Grahame is a good data resource for my study. With the aim to evaluate the quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of the English grammatical cohesive devices, this study attempts to make a comparative analysis of the grammatical devices used in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and their Vietnamese equivalents translated by Google Translate. When studying it, we not only focus on the kinds of grammatical devices based on the framework of Halliday and Hasan (1976) but also try to find out the translation errors in the Vietnamese translation made by Google Translate to see which kind of grammatical cohesive devices Google Translate translates more accurately. That is the reason why I choose the topic “Grammatical cohesion in ‘The Wind in the Willow’ by Kenneth Grahame and their equivalents in Google Translate’s Vietnamese Translations”.
Aim and Objectives 1. Aim This study aims to examine the quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of the grammatical cohesive devices in “The Wind in the Willow” by Kenneth Grahame in terms of translation errors. Objectives In order to achieve this aim, the researcher: - identified the types of grammatical cohesive devices in “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, - identified the Vietnamese equivalents in Google Translate’s translations of the English grammatical cohesive devices, and - examined the translation errors in the Vietnamese translations of the grammatical cohesive devices to see which type of the English grammatical cohesive devices Google Translate translates more accurately. Research Questions To achieve the above aim and objectives, the researcher collected data and analyzed it to answer the following questions: 1.
What kinds of grammatical cohesive devices are used in "The Wind in the Willow" by Kenneth Grahame? 2. What are the Vietnamese equivalents of these grammatical cohesive devices in Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations? 3. What kinds of translation errors are committed in Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of these grammatical cohesive devices? 4.