An Evaluation of the Vietnamese Translated Version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong

An Evaluation of the Vietnamese Translated Version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong Nguyễn Thị Thu Hiền Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành:

An Evaluation of the Vietnamese Translated Version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen

Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong

Nguyễn Thị Thu Hiền

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15

Người hướng dẫn: Ph.D Phạm Thị Thanh Thùy

Năm bảo vệ: 2012

Abstract It is undeniable that the assessment of translation is becoming of great

important and receiving great concerns of many researchers The more translations are published, the more necessary it is to control the quality of such works so that the readers can enjoy the best of the foreign literature work via its translation For that reason, in this minor study, with a view to assess the quality of the translation of “The Call of the Wild”, the researcher utilizes the schema of Translation Quality Assessment proposed by New Mark By this way, the researcher has found out that although the translation text has achieved a lot of success in conveying the author’s message, it still reveals some mismatches between the source text and the translated text Noticeably, some sentences in translated version do not transfer enough message in the original text

or the meaning occasionally changed In addition, some vocabulary mistakes, printing mistakes and punctuation mistakes which may affect the conciseness of the translation are also pointed out On the basis of such findings, some implications for literary

translation are drawn

Keywords Ngôn ngữ học; Tiếng Anh; Dịch thuật

Content

1 Rational for the study

Translation is an issue which attracts more and more attention from many people all over the world Nowadays, in the inevitable trend of globalization and integration, not only the professional translators but also many people working in different fields such as health care, economy, politics, etc, are concerned about the quality of translation However, in fact, to have a high-quality translation version, especially in the field of literature, is not an easy task and it involves a lot of skills from the translators According to the translator Thuy Toan(1993), to have

a good translation version, the translator must not only love his job and literature but also be good at their mother tongue, know foreign languages, have a thorough knowledge of culture, work cautiously and be industrious at consulting From his point of view, it is clear that translation is a challenging job, which requires the translator both the knowledge of the language and the background knowledge of the culture which the literary works belongs to Sometimes,

due to lack of either of these or because of the translator’s carelessness, the translated version may not be concise enough Even more seriously, it can transfer the wrong message that is attached in the literary works At present, in Vietnam, works of literary translations are growing rapidly, even uncontrollably in quantity for commercial purposes ; however, there has been no popular criterion for a good and valuable translated version Besides the successfully -translated masterpieces such as Wuthering Heights (Đồi gió hú ), Harry Porter, Noruwei no mori (Rừ ng Nauy), The Centaur in the Garden (Con nhân mã ở trong vườn ), there still exists ones of bad quality, for example , the Vietnamese version of “The Da Vinci Code” (Mật mã Da Vinci ) by translator Đo Thu Ha (Van Hoa-Thong Tin Publisher ,2006) This translation receives a lot of criticism right from publication because of the mistakes that she should not have made in terms

of vocabulary, grammar and descriptions For this reason, the minor thesis would like to focus on the evaluation of one literary translation so that the readers can have better understanding of some models of translation quality assessment initiated by some famous linguists in the world like Nida and Taber, Peter Newmark, and J House, etc

Within the limitation of the minor thesis, only some of these models will be introduced, and then, the model of Peter Newmark will be applied in evaluating the Vietnamese translated version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong, two great and famous Vietnamese translators to point out both the strengths and weaknesses of translated texts

in comparison with the original Also, the author would like to investigate the prominent equivalence types the translator has achieved in translating this famous masterpiece so that other translators can get some experiences from them

2 Objective of the study

This thesis mainly aims at answering the three research questions:

 How good is the Vietnamese version of “The Call of the Wild” according to Newmark’s model?

 What are the weaknesses of the translated version?

 What might be some lessons learned from the translation version?

3 Scope and method of the study

3.1 Scope of the study

The masterpiece “The Call of the Wild” includes of seven chapters in total Due to the limited time for this study, only Chapter Two of this short story will be chosen as the typical analysis of the success and the shortcomings of two translators in translating this masterpiece from English into Vietnamese The title of this chapter is “The Law of Club and Fang” and the reason why this chapter is chosen is that the writer has had access to this chapter since she was a fourth year student At that time, she had chances to learn about this chapter in the subject

“English Literature”, which attracts her a lot Moreover, this is a moving chapter about the process in which the dog adapts itself to the new harsh environment and rude owners Therefore, the writer decides to make a comparison between the original version and the translated one to see whether the translators can transship both the connotative and denotative meaning of the source text into the target text or not

a Method of the study

The goal of this study is to evaluate the quality of the translated version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong To reach this goal, I decide to have an insight into various translation quality assessment models by different authors, among which Peter Newmark’s model is chosen as the main criteria for assessing the Vietnamese version of this masterpiece because of its strong points in terms of application, that is, it is easy to follow During the assessing process, Contrastive Analysis approach will be applied to compare and evaluate the translated version against the original one

This assessing process will be carried out as follows First, the original text will be read thoroughly and comprehensively, then the source text will be compared to its translation under the framework of NewMark’s TQA model According to his model, there are five main steps towards TQA and the researcher is going to strictly follow them:

 Step 1: A brief analysis of the SL text stressing its intention and its functional aspects

 Step 2: the translator’s interpretation of the SL text’s purpose, his translation method and the translation’s likely readership

 Step 3: A selective but representative detailed comparison of the translation with the original in terms of both sematics and syntactics

 Step 4: an evaluation of the translation: - (a) in the translator’s terms, (b) in the critic’s terms, (c) as a piece of writing, independently of its original

 Step 5: Where appropriate, an assessment of the likely place of the translation in the target language culture or discipline

4 Organization of the study

The study contains three main parts:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Development This part includes two chapters:

Chapter 1: Literature Review

This part will discuss different basic aspects of translation, which is compulsory background knowledge for any translation assessor who wishes to evaluate the quality of translation, including definition of translation, translation methods and procedures, translation equivalence, and translation assessment

Chapter 2: Application of Newmark’s TQA model in evaluating Chapter Two of “The Call of the wild”

In this chapter, Newmark’s five- step TQA model mentioned above will be applied in assessing the Vietnamese version of chapter 2 in the works “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London

Finally, part 3 will deal with the discussion of the results of this study and some conclusions will

be drawn

The quality of the translation text including both translators’ strengths and weaknesses, which are based on the application of the model, will be discussed Also, some implications and suggestions will be made for other translators, especially in the field of literature

References

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Websites

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http://evan.vnexpress.net/news/phe-binh/dich thuat/2005/10/3b9acafe/

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