HANOI UNIVERSITY

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

ASSIGNMENT COVER

Unit: TRANSLATION & INTERPRETING THEORY

Lecture: Hoang Thi Anh

Ngo Van Giang

Class: 3A-17

Student: Trịnh Thu Hằng Student ID: 1707010107

Tel: 0981060472

THE REFLECTION WRITING ON TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING

Due date: 8th, October, 2019 Date of submission: 8th, October, 2019

Signature of student:

Hanoi - 2019
 QUESTION
1. Discuss major skills probably used at Input, Deciphering and Output stages in Peter New
Mark’s model. State some difficulties you might face when these skills are in practice and
suggest possible solutions accordingly.
2. Discuss the problem of equivalence in meaning. Illustrate with specific examples.
3. What translation strategies/techniques could be applied when doing translation of idioms and
fixed expressions from Vietnamese into English? Illustrate with specific examples.
4. What are the main features denoting the translation process of a particular text?

ANSWERS
1/ According to Peter New Mark’s Model of interpreting, there are five main stages: Input,
Understanding, Deciphering, Transference and Output, which require particular skills. There are
some majors skills used at three stages of Input, Deciphering and Output.

Input stage is the stage of recording information so three main kinds of skills used are
listening, note-taking and memory skills. Firstly, listening skills play an important role at this
stage to receive the message of speakers in source language (SL). It is not only about ability of
acute hearing but also about concentrated or discriminative listening, also known as active
listening. Secondly, memory skills are decisive factor in the success of this procedure at least in
how much the interpreter can get from the speakers, especially short-term memory (Jing, 2013).
As there is a limit of human memory, having note-taking skills is particularly necessary in this
procedure to help the interpreter remember the details and long sentences of a speech (Jing,
2013).
At the stage of Deciphering, the interpreters get rid of all the words, retaining the
concept, the ideas after decoding the messages from the source speech (Bui & Dang, 1997).
Thus, this stage requires the skills of memorizing, discourse analyzing, and conversion.
“Discourse analysis observes the colloquial, cultural, and indeed, human use of a language,
including all the "um"s, "uh"s, slips of the tongue, and awkward pauses” in the running of
conversation (Richard, 2019). Meanwhile, conversion refers to convert a word class in SL into
another word class in accordance to the expressions in target language (TL) due to the difference
in expression ways between different languages (Steve, 2014).
The last and also the decisive stage in the interpreting process is Output, in which the
interpreters have to find an equivalent idiomatic expression and then transfer the meaning in TL
to listeners (Bui & Dang, 1997). It require the skills of paraphrasing and public speaking, that
means the interpreters use understanding expressing in their own words then using speaking
skills with proper tone, voice and words to make listeners understand.

To become a good interpreter, an interpreting students might experience many struggles

at the beginning, so there are some difficulties that beginners might face in practicing
interpreting with the skills above and some solutions accordingly.
From my experience, the first problem to new interpreters is about listening. The fact is
that a new interpreter would get nervous when interpreting especially when there is something
not immediately clear to them. As a result, they may lose concentration and miss ideas or
information. At this time, interpreters should set up spirit and concentration, keep calm and
cautious then listen continually and refer back on what they have already understood to
understand unclear points. Moreover it is easy to be distracted by noise or some other objective
factors, so the interpreter should also learn to be alert (Jing, 2013).
In note-taking, some of the most popular issues are lack of time to note down enough
information before the speakers move the next ideas and lack of clarity in their notes (Marta,
2012). To improve their note-taking skills, they should create themselves a system of symbols
and abbreviation practice more and so that their note-taking speed can be increased. Moreover,
the note should be simple, easy to understand and not too much.
Students also get a big difficult in memorizing information from source speech with their
short-term memory while interpreting. The best solution is exercising it frequently with
memorizing exercises. Besides, remembering keywords and visualizing memorization, which
can be understand to visualize source information by forming a scene or picture to accentuate
memory, are some other effective ways to improve short-term memory (Jing, 2013).
Another problem in interpreting the learners might face is misunderstanding when
discourse analyzing owing to lack of cultural and social background knowledge, lack of
knowledge about languages or be out of context. Consequently, they can also get trouble with
converting the SL into TL. In these cases, students should try themselves to enhance knowledge
by reading, researching or watching about culture, society, language and so on. Additionally,
during interpreting, it is crucial to follow the speaker’s line of thought in the context.
At the last stage, some learners might also struggle with paraphrasing and speaking skills
as well. This issue often related to lack of vocabularies of TL even when it belongs to their own
culture, so it’s essential to enhance our vocabulary everyday by reading books, newspapers,
listening to radio, watching news and so on.

To sum up, interpreting process requires a lot of skills and the effort of interpreters and
there might be numerous of difficulties. However, if we understand our weakness and try to
improve, we can turn it into our strength, overcome all challenges to be professional in
interpreting.

2/ In the world, there are various cultures and difference among cultures make the
difference in creating new words, expressions, etc., and these alternations of words in any
country demonstrate their certain thoughts and perspectives (Ahmad, 2016). According to
Jakobson (1959, p.), “there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units”. Hence, one of
the biggest problems to anyone working in the fields of translation and interpreting is non-
equivalence in meaning between SL and TL, also called non-equivalence at word level in a study
of Baker (1992). It results in difficulties in understanding between two language and loss of
meaning in translating process. These are some main issues of equivalence in word meaning.

Firstly, there is no equivalence in words between culture-specific concepts between two

languages. The word in SL may express a concept which is totally unknown in the TL (abstract
or concrete; it may relate to a religious belief, a custom or even a type of food) (Baker, 1992).
For example, Vietnam has tradition of water rice agriculture forming specific cultures, it created
words related to rice such as “cốm, tấm, gạo nếp, tẻ”, agriculture tools like “xe bò, gầu, đòn
gánh”, traditional marriage procedures (dạm ngõ, ăn hỏi, thách cưới) or beliefs and religions
(miếu thờ, bài vị, chúa Thượng Ngàn) that quite strange to foreigners (Vu, 2007).
Secondly, words express concepts are known but no equivalent words in TL. The SL
concept is not lexicalized in the target culture. In case of the word “phu nhân”, in Vietnamese it
describes the wife of a man having high position in society, especially in past. In English, there
is no equivalent word. Depend on contexts, it might translate to English by the word “wife” or
“lady” but both of them cannot transfer complete meaning in specific situations.
Thirdly, the TL lacks a superordinate. It may have specific words (hyponyms) but no
general word (superordinate). For example, in Vietnamese, there is the word “xanh” can be used
for both “green” and “blue” in many circumstances, so in daily communication, Vietnamese
often use the word “xanh” for both. Whereas there is a strong distinction between “green” and
“blue” in English, no word implies both meaning of those words. Consequently, the Vietnamese-
English translators may be confused of choosing “blue” or “green” in the situation they said
“chiếc khăn xanh”.
On the other hand, there are also cases that the TL lacks of hyponyms (specific terms).
For instance, Vietnamese distinguish clearly animals such as “ếch, nhái, cóc, etc.,” but all those
animals is called “frog” in English, or about relationship, “cô, dì, bác gái, mợ, thím” are all
called “aunt”, no distinction.
 Besides, there are also problems about differences in expressive meaning. A good
example is that the meaning of the word “sexy” in English is “attractive” which is generally
complimentary and positive, on the contrary, it means “khêu gợi, gợi tình” (wearing erotically)
in Vietnamese. Thus, if translators interpret the sentence “You look so sexy today!” to “Hôm nay
em thật là khêu gợi”, it might make the listeners misunderstand the speaker’s message. Or in the
case of translating the word “individual” in an English compliment "She is a real individual!" to
Vietnamese, it becomes an insult: “Cô ấy thực sự rất cá nhân” because in America, a strong
individual who can stand on his/her feet” is a better one while in Vietnam, a member should not
stand out the group (Pham, 2010, p.34).
The last common problem of equivalence in meaning is the differences in physical and
interpersonal perspective. In term of the physical perspective, it concerns the location of things
or people in the context with others. For example, in English-Vietnamese translation, “come”
and “go” both means “đi”. However, “come” means getting closer the speaker while “go” means
getting away from the speaker. It is similar to other pairs such as “take- bring”, “arrive- depart”
and so on (Baker, 1992). “Interpersonal perspective draws the attention to the relationship among
participants in the discourse” (Baker, 1992, p. 23). For example, with the word “to give”, there is
the distinction on people being given in Vietnamese. “biếu, tặng, cống, nạp” are used when
Vietnamese give presents for his seniors or the elderly. It also corresponds to Vietnamese verbs
“đưa” (to give with one hand), “cho” (to give to someone of your status or younger), “tặng” (to
give to someone who is slightly higher in status), and “biếu” (to give to someone who is much
higher in status or age / to give with great respect) (Pham, 2010, p.34).

Due to the complication and non-equivalence in word meaning, the translator should base
on context and cultural and linguistic background knowledge tightly to deal with the matters of
non-equivalence in meaning.

3/ As Moon (1998) in her book “A Corpus-Based Approach” has defined idiom as “an
ambiguous term, used in conflicting ways‟, there is the fact that one of the big difficulties
translators encounter in translating is when doing translation of idioms and fixed expression .
The main issues of translating idiomatic and fixed expressions relate to two main points: “the
ability to recognize and interpret an idiom correctly and the difficulties in rendering various
aspects of meaning that an idiom or a fixed expression conveys into the target language” (Baker
1992, p. 65). To deal with these problems, there are some strategies and techniques in translating
idioms and expression from Vietnamese into English. Baker (1992) declares four strategies
considering this issue as follows: Using an idiom of similar meaning and form, using an idiom of
similar meaning but dissimilar form, translation by paraphrase and translation by omission (pp.
71-78).
The first technique is using idiom or fixed expression of similar meaning and form, that
means to use an idiom in the TL having the similar meaning as the SL idiom and containing
equivalent lexical items (Gabriella, 2016, p.67). For example, the idiom “đổ tiền xuống cống”
can be translated into English using the same words “pour money down the drain”, another is
“thời gian là tiền bạc” which translates as “time is money” or “kill time” which is “giết thời
gian” with same meanings. However, such ideal matches are not common, so it is usually
essential to use other techniques to overcome problems with idioms and fixed expression.
The second strategy is using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form. It is based
on the possibility to find an idiom or expression in the English expressing a similar meaning to
that in Vietnamese idiom but containing different lexical items. A good example for this case is
the translation for “nhập gia tùy tục” which is translated as “when in the Rome, do as the
Romans do” in English. The meaning of the both idioms is clearly the same “when you
are visiting another place, you should follow the customs of the people in that place” (Cambridge
Learner’s Dictionary, 1995) but each language expresses it due to the culture of that language.
Some other similar examples such as “ngưu tầm ngưu, mã tầm mã” translated as “birds of a
feather flock together” or “kiến bò trong bụng” which is “have butterflies in your stomach” in
English.

The third one is translation by paraphrase. According to Baker, this is the most common
way of idioms and expression translation when equivalence cannot be found in the TL or when it
is inappropriate to use idiomatic language in the target text. For example, in a Vietnamese
sentence “Thằng bé đi học buổi đực buổi cái”, the fixed expression “buổi đực buổi cái” is used,
meaning “irregularly” and there is no corresponding fixed expression in English. Therefore, it
should be paraphrased as “doing something irregularly”.

The last strategy is translation by omission. In certain situations, whole Vietnamese

phrases cannot be easily paraphrased and do not have a close match in English, or because of
stylistic considerations, so they might be omitted from the source text. For instance, in the
Vietnamese sentence of a story “Vào thời gian đó, có một người đàn bà vui vẻ, ăn thô nói tục đến
ngôi nhà để giúp việc nhà” is suggested the following translation: “Around that time a merry,
foul-mouthed woman came to the house to help with the chores”. The expression “ăn thô” has
been omitted in English because both “ăn thô” and “nói tục” in this case have the function to
create the meaning of being foul-mouthed, using offensive language.
4/ In translation process, the first step is choosing a method of approach. According to
Newmark (1988), there are two main approaches to translating. The first method is translating
sentence by sentence of a paragraph or a chapter to get the tone and feel of the text, and then
review the position, finally read the rest of the SL text. The second method involves reading the
whole text for two or three times, finding intention, register, tone, then mark the tough words and
passages. After taking the bearings, translators can start translating the text. Secondly, as
Newmark has declared, when translating, there are four level in mind which are also four
features denoting the translation process of particular text.
The first level is the textual level. It involves working on the SL text level.  It is the level
in which conversions of languages are made intuitively and automatically. The SL grammar is
transposed into TL equivalents and the lexical units are translated into sense that is appropriate to
the context. This is the level of the literal translation of the source language into the target
language, the level of the translationese you have to eliminate, but it also acts as a corrective or
paraphrase and a parer-down of synonyms (Newmark, 1988).
Second is the referential level which goes hand in hand with the textual level. A sentence
should not be read without seeing it on the referential level. Whether it is technical, literary or
institutional text, your mind has to be made up summarily and continuously to know what it is
about, what is its purpose. For example, the sentence “hôm qua, ông ấy đã đi rồi” in Vietnamese
can be understood as “yesterday, he passed away” or “yesterday, he left” depend on the context.
This is the level translator mentally sorts out the text. It is also the level of objects and events,
that even are real or imaginary, build up a referential picture in their mind for comprehension
and reproduction process.
The next level is cohesive level. It follows both the structure and the moods of the text. It
links the sentences through the connective words such as conjunctions, enumerations,
reiterations, definite article, general words, referential synonyms and punctuation marks which
proceed from known information to new information. The mood, which moves between
negative, emotive and neutral, is the second factor in this level. The difference of positive and
neutral can be seen in words such as “astonished” and “surprised”, “awesome” and “amazing”,
etc., These are slight differences in words in a particular language whose value cannot always be
determined in the context.
The last one of translation process is the level of Naturalness. In translating any type of
text, translators have to sense naturalness, which mean their translation makes sense and reads
naturally as it is written in ordinary language. The translator have to use his special way of
writing in an ordinary language employing common grammar, idioms and words that meet
particular situation. As Newmark (1988) has stated “you can only do this by temporarily
disengaging yourself from the SL text, by reading your own translation as though no
original existed”.
In conclusion, the above four levels should be combined and kept parallel to each other in
the process of translation. These four levels are distinct and may be conflict with one another. In
translation, the accuracy or reality level is significant features needing to be considered at the
final stage, but these factor should be inserted into the text only when it is necessary to secure or
complete the reader’s understanding of the text, and normally just for informative and vocative
texts.
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