My internship report at a software technology company in HCMC, vietnam

REPORT ON THE PRACTICAL INTERNSHIP AT CODELINK Besides a headquarter in Vietnam, CodeLink also has its first branch located in Singapore, and a strategic vision of two founders is to tur

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgement 3

I Introduction 4

II Report on the practical internship at CodeLink 5

III Experiences from the practical internship 8

IV Suggestions for improvement 12

V Conclusion 14

VI References 15

VII Appendices 1 16

VIII Appendices 2 19

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank the staffs of CodeLink for enabling me to work in their office to observe and participate in their daily operations, and for also placing their great trust in my capabilities at a very point:

Executive Manager, Mr Daniel Campel for his vital support and assistance

CTO, Mr Nguyen Khac Anh for the authentic advice and useful guidance

I would like to express my very great appreciation to Ms Pham Thai Bao Ngoc,

MA in English Linguistics & Literature - my research supervisor, for her patient guidance, enthusiastic encouragement and useful critiques for this internship report Her willingness to give her time so generously has been appreciated

Finally, I would like to send my gratitude towards the love of my family – my parents and my little sister who always keep me going further and give me a great encouragement in every step that I take

I had been frequently struggling to answer to the question how it was to work in

a company until my university required every student to do a month-internship in a particular professional company for the purpose of gaining experience and graduating Later, I found myself in a lucky position that I had been accepted to Marketing and Management Assistant position at CodeLink company During an internship period, I had an answer to the above question as well as an invaluable opportunity to practically apply my knowledge into reality

CodeLink is a software development service company, which was founded by two enthusiastic talented people, Daniel Campel and Nguyen Khac Anh The business concentrates upon product development, innovative solution, and process to ensure customer satisfaction and market success Similarly, the company commits itself to best practice Agile and Extreme Programming methodologies to the end that improves software quality and instantly responds to alternation Especially, company’s teams build state-of-art Ruby, Node.JS, React, iOS and Android applications from scratch Codelink has run its the business since 2016 and the company’s headquarter in Vietnam is located at Level 5 55 Truong Dinh Street, Ward 6, District 3, HCMC Because this company is newly born in the software market, it is required to operate correctly and effectively by detailed concentration into its management system where I laid my very first initial footprints

My job responsibilities were mainly focused on translating which includes the tasks of delivering English blog posts and news to Vietnamese and vice versa, arranging paperwork for back-office operation, and preparing marketing content for various social media channels

II REPORT ON THE PRACTICAL INTERNSHIP AT CODELINK

Besides a headquarter in Vietnam, CodeLink also has its first branch located in Singapore, and a strategic vision of two founders is to turn their software company into a professional service at a regional scale Nevertheless, most of my co-workers were excellent Vietnamese developers and programmers whose English competencies were not fluent and clear That the company has one specific rule in “CodeLink Bible” compulsorily requires everybody inside the office to communicate in English for the purpose of creating and building an English-speaking environment and speaking habits This working condition was unexpectedly great opportunity for me to use my language skills on a daily basis I personally witnessed a significant improvement in

my language capability as well as others after one week of entirely using English for work

On the other hand, my work fields covered enormously with information technology, software development strategies, and contracts Working under new concepts about technology, I had gradually gained for myself so much useful and interesting knowledge by building a self-study habit I usually made a study list of small tasks including new skills and information that I had to acquaint myself with in advance Whenever I finished my assigned tasks, Mr Campel – my direct supervisor – would carefully ascertain the results and give me his constructive and reliable advice

on how I could make a further improvement next time

Equally important, the company’s culture highly emphasizes on effective communication, which is important for the daily operation of the business Without good communication, especially in software development, the internal or external structure of one particular program can face numerous challenges that can lead to system faults and incompetence At a basic scale, the company increases its regular interaction via communicative system, which boosts conversations across different teams Due to the seamless interaction between my co-workers and me, it had greatly facilitated my working performance and job satisfaction thanks to continuous connection For instance, whenever I had a problem translating a sentence in CTO’s

blog post, I could instantly ask him for clearer clarification via internal communication tool – Slack

Study course at the English faculty has kindly provided me a large amount of information which comprises many applicable theories and practical skills in translation and interpreting, especially the subject of “Theory of Translation” and

“Translation Practice” Employment soft skills, coupled with translation knowledge, likewise played an important role in my internship, for instance “Presentation skills” and “English for the Office” In reality, translation trainees not only should be a master of translation techniques, but they also must possess background information

in the fields that they are translating

In general, literary translation, which carefully maintains stylistic figures of language, is very different from technical translation, which is aimed at one specialized field During internship period, I handled various types of writing, especially technical texts (blog posts and guidance), which serve to increase readers’ knowledge, and to provide readers with a better comprehension Obviously, accuracy and consistency in choosing equivalence translation are extremely fundamental and knowingly difficult to achieve Technical translation techniques are mainly used in informative texts which require a translator to explain new terminologies; therefore, these techniques were deliberately applied throughout my translation process This type of translation extensively embraces the effectiveness of communicative translation that seeks for transferring the exact information and messages (translating contract, receipt and invoice) rather than linguistic features Peter Newmark (1988) pointed out in his book that “communicative translation attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership” (p 41) With this in mind, I intentionally tried to immerse myself in the technical language context by reading technological materials, and carefully sought precision in every translation Since inaccurate and poor translation in information technology and legal documentations may publicly damage the corporate image, and undermine translator’s credentials, which is the last thing any translator would expect

As previously mentioned, the main purpose of translating a technical text is to precisely render message and information to its readers Technical translation covers many kinds of specialized texts; as a consequence, requirements of a comprehensive knowledge, and mastery of relevant terminologies should be highly considered Understanding the source text is the first step in the process of translating, and this step could only be taken by mastery of the source language and technological domain

In fact, I subconsciously divided a translating process into different stages The first step is to get the main idea of the whole text for assimilating the text and its meanings Then the translator will need to understand the text in depth and attach himself/herself

to the specific words, for example neologism1, in order to give more meanings to the thoughts of the original author These terms generally require people to possess an adequate knowledge of terminologies, which are used in the field Indeed, a professional translator also has to be an excellent writer when I have to make sure the final text is easy to read, aside from maintaining the ideas from the source text The translator may need to re-organize some parts of a technical text if he/she feels this would help the readers to better understand Then, once this is achieved, the text must

be reinterpreted and adapted to the target language By this way, the translator’s responsibility is not only in translation but they also act as an editor

1 : a new word or expression or a new meaning of a word

Neologism (n.d.) In Oxford Learner's Dictionaries Retrieved June 4, 2017, from

http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/neologism#neologism 4

III EXPERIENCES FROM THE PRACTICAL INTERNSHIP

On the whole, the one-month internship at CodeLink is tremendously a valuable experience to me Since the apprentice not only gave me the first-hand experience to apply classroom’s theories into reality, but also particularly developed my personal outlook on life In fact, I would like to describe my work experiences in details about which skills I have gained so far and how I coped with different arising problems Firstly, it is true to say that working as a translator and management assistant in technological company was a tremendous responsibility to a first-hand trainee, especially to me The weighty duties that I had received, in another way, turned out to

be a company’s acknowledgement of my crucial competence I was extremely grateful for the fact that CodeLink had significantly put their great trust on me I was given many translating tasks, which translation concepts were about contracts and technological articles Needless to say, that duty had helped me enormously sharpening my translation techniques as well as enriching my vocabulary range

As identified by Vietnam Labor Law, employment contract must include all of the terms that are stated in the code including many important aspects such as payment, increment, insurance, rights, obligations and termination While preparing labor documentation, I consistently kept in mind that the verbal language used has to

be properly formal and exact, yet the contract content has a great meaning to its bearers In the same way, the documentation may be used to testify or verify any possible legal case; therefore, I must be distinctly prudent in choosing formal and recognizable equivalences An illustration of finding a suitable translation is when I was given a task of translating an English labor contract to Vietnamese, and I also needed to do an extra clarification whenever possible After examining the English contract, which I found it increasingly demanding because I did not know much about human resources areas Therefore, I should do a thorough research in Vietnam Labor Law and its writing style for the purpose of locating which aspects are needed to be included in the employment contract It was a good luck for me that both English and Vietnamese contracts share the majority of similar concepts and legal terms which already defined and utilized between the two languages, for instance, allowance – phụ cấp; performace bonus – thưởng thành tích; increment policy – chế độ tăng lương;

obligation – nghĩa vụ It is necessary to clarify what is meant by HR professional terms such as gross–net salary relating to Vietnam compulsory insurance laws, confidentiality agreements no sharing without authorization, and maternity leave for female employee and premium payment This specialized information has helped me gain a better understanding of which rights that employee is deserved to embrace and protected by laws As a result, I can prevent inequality and defend misconduct acts for

me and other people

Likewise, it is commonly acknowledged that translating plus preparing contract documentation demands a translator with an assiduous attention and proper skills in using a high and clear language formality The correlation between translating lexical vocabularies and writing official Vietnamese statements has enriched my mother-tongue language skills to a greater transparency

Besides translating labor contract, my supervisor had requested me to translate technical blog posts which were contributed to Vietnamese programmer communities and raised brand awareness To be honest, I had not known anything about programming and not understood about information technology, in order words, I must inquisitively start to learn about them from a very basic principle in order to accomplish given duties Generally, most of the blog posts was written to give its readers a simple method on how to encode functions or orders into computer program Henceforth, the writing style was kept to a publicly easy and understandable manner without any advance level of sentence structures or multi-layer meanings Communicative translation is widely used in this type of text that eliminates some aspects of linguistic features, and pursues an objective of sufficient information This technique surprisingly provides translator more freedom in translating and choosing equivalences

Important to realize that translating technical blog posts are not lying on translation techniques, but it is emphasized new neologism or terminologies which its correct meanings will affect translation quality As explained by Peter Newmark (1988), “the central difficulty in technical translation is usually the new terminology.” (p.152) I personally think that computer programmers, in particular, prefer to use neologism, resulted in a large amount of newly invented coined terms such as

(hackathon2), abbreviations (app – software application – phần mềm ng dụng), acronyms (UI – user interface – tương tác người dùng, UX – user experience – trải nghiệm người dùng) Computer programmers mainly use these specialized terms to communicate within their communities for the matter of saving time and accelerating work speed Without the basic knowledge of how software application is built, it is asserted that translating technological texts would be hard to complete, yet it may consume a considerable time to discover a suitable translation and finish the task

To familiarize with information technology, I began to learn about it gradually

on a daily basis From a starting point, I tried to acquaint myself with terms that appear everyday, and people frequently discuss about such as iOS, Android and Window – these names represent for mobile device operating systems (hệ điều hành di động) Different programmers favour various programming languages (ngôn ngữ lập trình), for example, React Native, JavaScript, Node.js, HTML5, and Ruby on Rails, and programmers tend to permanently keep using one particular language for building

an application, except for professional individuals who can fluently perform in variety

of programming language Complimentary to platforms and programming tools, building a successful application works effectively in manageable software development process, when I need to study about Agile Methods (Phương pháp phát triển phần mềm linh hoạt) Later, to prove my research on Agile and share the knowledge with my colleagues, my supervisor required me to prepare a presentation about this method, which I completed successfully

On the other hand, it is certainly true that any employee need to acquire many soft skills, which are quite beneficial in personal life as well, in order to greater

succeed According to American National Association of Colleges and Employers,

Job Outlook 2016 (p.30), nearly 80 percent employers looked for teamwork skills in Class of 2016 graduates, while written communication skills and problem-solving skills were also highly valued Those skills such as the ability to work in teams, think critically, build healthy colleague relationship, maintain work-life balance are

2 : a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development This event lasts between a day and a week Retrieved June 12, 2017, from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon