Strategies to translate vietmamese feudal titles into english

One of the problems translators might face on when translating Vietnamese historical documents is dealing with culture specific terms like Vietnamese feudal titles.. Aims of the study:

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES THE FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

- -PHAN THỊ MƠ

STRATEGIES TO TRANSLATE VIETNAMESE

FEUDAL TITLES INTO ENGLISH

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE

DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ART (TEFL)

SUPERVISOR: NGUYỄN NINH BẮC, M.A

Hanoi, May 2011

Signature

Phan Thi Mo

Date: 04.05.2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to express my deep sense of gratitude

to my supervisor, Mr Nguyễn Ninh Bắc, M.A for his valuable support and guidance for the graduation paper, without whom I might not have finished the paper

In addition, I would like to send my sincere thanks to Mr Nguyễn Thành Vân for his enthusiastic help and useful materials

I am also much obliged to the librarian staff at University of Foreign Languages and International Studies and National Library of Vietnam, who lent me materials and reference books

Last but not least, words of thanks are addressed to my family and friends who continuously offered me both financial and spiritual support throughout the last period of time

ABSTRACT

In order to meet the increasingly high requirement of the process of globalization and comprehensive integration into the international community, English written and translated documents on Vietnamese history should be given careful attention and serious consideration One of the problems translators might face on when translating Vietnamese historical documents is dealing with culture specific terms like Vietnamese feudal titles In the study, by the method of sampling, 132 translated titles were

picked up from four books, Vietnam, The Revolutionary Path (Hodgkin, 1981), Vietnam and the Chinese model (Woodside, 1971), Land equalization

in 1893 in Binh Dinh seen from the land records (Phan, 2009) and Historical characters of the Dinh-Le dynasties (Truong, 2008) Then, necessary

calculation was made to figure out the percentage of the translation procedures and the most common procedures applied to interpret the Vietnamese feudal titles Moreover, basing on theory on translation, the researcher identified the possible advantages and disadvantages of applying each procedure to render the titles Finally, some worthy notifications when translating the titles were also provided in the paper

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS i

ABSTRACT ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iii

LIST OF TABLES v

LIST OF CHARTS vi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii

LIST OF APPENDIXES viii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale 1

2 Aims of the study 1

3 Significance of the study 2

4 Scope of study 3

5 Methodology 3

6 Structure of study 4

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 1 Definition of translation 6

2 Procedures of translation 9

3 Translation equivalents 12

4 Translation of culutral terms 13

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

1 Sampling 17

2 Data analysis process .18

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DICUSSION 1 An overview of translation procedures applied to translate Vietnamese feudal titles into English .19

2 Advantages and disadvantages when using the chosen translation procedures to translate Vietnames feudal titles into English .21

3 Some notifications 30

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 1 Summary of the research 36

2 Limitations 38

3 Suggestion 38

REFERENCES .40

APPENDIXES .42

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: examples of applying cultural equivalent

Table 2: examples of applying functional equivalent

LIST OF CHARTS:

Chart 1: Frequency of using translation procedures applied to translate

Vietnamese feudal titles

Chart 2: Two main couples of translation procedures applied to translate

Vietnamese feudal titles

LIST OF APPENDIXES

Appendix 1: English translations of Vietnamese feudal titles in Historical

characters of the Đinh – Lê dynasties

Appendix 2: English translations of Vietnamese feudal titles in Land

equalization in 1839 in Bình Định seen from the land records

Appendix 3: English translations of Vietnamese feudal titles in Vietnam –

the Revolutionary Path

Appendix 4: English translations of Vietnamese feudal titles in Vietnam and

the Chinese model

of Vietnamese feudal titles will surely appear However, the current situation does not meet the needs of reality The number of books on Vietnamese history written in or translated into English is still limited Furthermore, at both university level and national level, no research on translating Vietnamese feudal titles has been conducted

Acknowledging the needs of reality and the current situation, the researcher decides to undertake a study on “Strategies to translate Vietnamese feudal titles into English”

2 Aims of the study:

The researcher decided to purchase on this study for the purposes that are investigating translation procedures applied to transform Vietnamese feudal titles into English, identifying possible strong and weak points of each procedures, thus giving some notes on translating the titles

In order to achieve the target purposes, the paper is designed to find answers to three following research questions:

- Which translation procedures have so far been used to translate Vietnamese feudal titles?

- What are advantages and disadvantages of applying the translation procedures in interpreting the titles?

- Whether exists more than one English translated version for one original concept or not? If yes, what is the cause of the dissimilarity between/ among translations?

3 Significance of the study:

This paper is hoped to serve as a precedent in studying English translated historical documents Therefore, it is hoped to bring out the following main benefits

Vietnamese-First, the researcher can enrich her own knowledge of Vietnamese history, especially the way of naming mandarins and members of royal family as well as the content of their titles It will be surely helpful for the researcher to deal with Vietnamese feudal titles in future

Second, Vietnamese history is a quite complex and difficult yet exciting and research-worthy field to be approached Therefore, to translation and interpreting students in University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, the research can

be considered a motivation for them to carry out further studies on this field

Finally, to translators, interpreters and individuals taking considerable interest in Vietnamese history in general and Vietnamese feudal titles in particular, the paper is a valid reference resource when they read and translate documents on Vietnamese history

4 Scope of the study:

Although the title of the study is “Strategies to translate Vietnamese feudal titles into English”, it is impossible for the researcher to cover all units of Vietnamese feudal titles Therefore, the participants of the study are just the translations of the titles that are selected in four following books:

- Vietnam – The Revolutionary Path (Thomas, 1981)

- Vietnam and the Chinese model A Comparative Study of Nguyễn and Ch‟ing Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Alexander, 1971)

- Historical characters of Đinh – Lê dynasties (Tưởng, 2008)

- Land equalization in 1893 in Binh Dinh seen from the land records (Thảo, 2009)

5 Methodology: Sampling

Because the size of the research population, Vietnamese feudal titles

is too large, not all units in the population can be identified Therefore, sampling was applied to let the researcher select the titles in the four chosen books In addition, directly observing the portion of the population would help the researcher to generalize which translation procedures are often adopted to transform the Vietnamese feudal titles

The two books, Vietnam, The Revolutionary Path and Vietnam and

the Chinese model were picked up because they are two well-known ones

about history of Vietnam written by foreign authors The two others are available in National Library of Vietnam It is easy for readers to get access

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Theories on definition translation, translation procedures, equivalents and translation of culture specific terms are provided in the second chapter

Chapter 3: Methodology

The chapter identifies the method which the researcher applied to conduct the paper

Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion

In this chapter, results of data analyzing process are presented Moreover, some note-worthy points in translations of some Vietnamese feudal titles are extensively discussed

Chapter 5: Conclusion

This chapter is composed of summary of the study, its limitations and suggestions for further research in future

Chapter 2:

LITERATURE REVIEW

Since the notion of translation came out in the world, it has been a hotly debated topic over a long period of time However, up to now, translation still seems to be a mysterious phenomenon about which no research or comprehensive theory can give a detailed and satisfactory explanation Therefore, in the second chapter, Literature Review, the researcher would like to give a brief recapitulation of theorists‟ and scholars‟ research on aspects of translation with the hope of providing readers with a general view on the researched field

The beginning of the chapter is marked by theory on definition of translation and the following parts are translation procedures and translation equivalents In addition, theories on cultural terms and their translations are also provided

1 Definitions of translation:

edition defines translation as “the process of changing sth that is written or spoken into another language” or “a text or work that has been changed from one language into another” From this definition, translation can be understood

to be a process or a complete product as a text or work However, there is no

clear introduction for readers about what they have to “change” in the text or work

In his own book titled A Textbook of Translation (1995), Translation Professor Peter Newmark stated “Often, though not by any means always, it

is rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the same way that the author intended the text” In this definition, Newmark considers translation as a process of “rendering the meaning” He also implicatively emphasizes the role of translator who must understand the author‟s intention first to be able to “render” the text‟s meaning accurately Nevertheless, this definition still does not clarify how to grasp the exact meaning of the text

Also considering translation both as a process and a product, Meetham and Hudson (1969, p.242) define “translation” as below:

“The process or result of converting information from one language or language variety into another (…) The aim is to reproduce as accurately as possible all

grammatical and lexical features of the “source language” original by finding equivalents in the “target language” At the same time all factual information

contained in the original text (…) must be retained in the translation.”

As this definition states, the task of a translator is reconstructing

“grammatical and lexical features” as well as reserving “all factual information” of the ST

Another definition is also given in the book Meaning-based Translation (Larson, 1984)

“Translation, then, consist of studying the lexicon, grammatical structure, communication situation, and cultural context of the source language text, analyzing it in order to determine its meaning, and then reconstructing this same meaning using the lexicon and grammatical structure which are appropriate in the receptor language and its cultural context”

In this definition, Larson also considers translation as a process Moreover, he makes it clearer by pointing out three steps of the process which are:

structure, communication situation and cultural context

This process can be represented through the following diagram:

Text to be translated

In conclusion, as a product, “translation” is a text or work in a different language but shares the same meaning with the original one As a process, “translation” contains three steps, studying, analyzing and reconstructing a text or work

2 Translation procedures:

MEANING

Translation

The participants of the research, Vietnamese feudal titles are at level Therefore, in this part, instead of presenting about translation methods, the researcher would like to provide a brief introduction of translation procedures which are strategies to deal with “sentences and the smaller unit

word-of language”

Like the definitions of translation, quite a few classifications of translation procedures are proposed They may be different in names but somehow similar in essence The forthcoming section is allotted to discuss Newmark‟s categorization of translation procedures According to Newmark (1995), there are eight main procedures of translation which are Transference, Naturalization, Through Translation, Shift or Transpositions, Modulation, Cultural Equivalent, Functional Equivalent and Descriptive Equivalent

Employing transference also named as loan word, transcription or

borrowing, the translator takes a SL word directly into TL text with no translation Proper names such as geographical and topographical names, names of periodicals and newspapers or street names are normally transferred Some examples are “Internet”, “MC”, “New York Times” or

“Washington”

Naturalization is the procedure that “adapts the SL words first to the

normal pronunciation, then to the normal morphology (word-forms) of the TL” (Newmark, 1995, p.82) For instance, “coffee”, “container” and

“sandal” are “naturalized” into “cà-phê”, “công-te-nơ” or “xăng-đan” respectively

The third type of translation procedure is through-translation also

called calque or loan translation which is the literal translation of a word or

an expression into the TL This procedure is usually applied to interpret common collocations, the components of compounds and names of organizations Some following examples are chosen to illustrate the use of through translation; UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural) – Tổ chức Giáo dục, Khoa học và Văn hóa Liên hiệp Quốc, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) – Tổ chức Hiệp ước Bắc Đại Tây Dương or WHO (World Health Organization) – Tổ chức Y tế Thế giới

A shift or transposition is “a translation procedure involving a

change in the grammar from SL to TL” (Newmark, 1995, p.85) It can be the change in part of speech of word or word order of an expression to agree with natural usage in the TL For example, “This is a beautiful house” is translated into “Đây là một ngôi nhà đẹp” or “His explanation is not clear” can be rendered into “Anh ấy giải thích không rõ ràng”

Modulation means a variation in the message when it is translated

into a TL due to a change in the point of view Some kinds of modulation procedures are “positive for double negative” in a specific formulation or context, “part for the whole”, “abstract for concrete”, “cause for effect”,

“one part for another”, “reversal of terms”, “active for passive” and “space for time” Being applied modulation, “The vase is not totally worthless” is reconstructed into “Cái bình này cũng có chút giá trị.”

Cultural equivalent is a translation procedure that a SL cultural

expression or word is translated by a TL cultural expression or word considered equivalent to it The procedure can be applied to translate general

texts, publicity, and propaganda or explain to readers who are not quite knowledgeable about the relevant SL culture In English, there is a question

“How much is a pint of beer?” or a direction “Go straight for about one mile and then turn left at the intersection” Their Vietnamese version should be

“Khoảng nửa lít bia bao nhiêu tiền?” và “Đi thẳng khoảng 400 mét nữa, đến ngã tư thì rẽ trái.”

Another type of translation procedure is functional equivalent that

requires the use of a culture-free word or expression, sometimes with a new specific term in a translation for a cultural word or expression in the source text For instance, Vietnamese equivalent for “Internal Revenue Service” is

“Tổng Cục Thuế”

Descriptive equivalent can be understood as the meaning of the

original word explained in several words For illustration, descriptive equivalent of “Samurai” is “the Japanese aristocracy from the eleventh to the nineteenth century and their function is protecting officers and administrators.”

Combining two translation procedures to deal with a single problem is

couplet The procedure is particularly common for cultural words where

transference may be combined with functional or cultural equivalent The sentence “To attend the barbecue, you must have a student ID” can be translated through couplet procedure into “Để được dự tiệc barbecue (bữa tiệc ngoài trời gồm các món nướng), anh phải mang theo thẻ sinh viên.”

3 Translation equivalent:

“Equivalence” which is “obviously a central concept” (Koller) is one

of the most problematic and controversial areas in the field of translation theory In this case, we consider translation as a complete product but not a process Meetham and Hudson (1972) opine that “texts in different languages can be equivalent in different degrees (fully or partially equivalent), in respect of different levels of presentation (equivalent in respect of context, of semantics, of grammar, of lexis, etc.) and at different ranks (word-for-word, phrase-for-phrase, sentence-for-sentence).” In fact, there is no absolute synonymy between words in the same language, so it is almost impossible for us to find out exactly what “equivalent” between texts

in different languages is However, it can be colloquially understood as the relationship between a ST and a TT that allows the TT to be considered as a translation of the ST

Among quite a few of categories of translation equivalence, Koller‟s which is based on meaning would be focused more as the following Koller (1995) proposes five types of equivalence which are denotative, connotative, text-normative, pragmatic or dynamic and formal one

Denotative equivalence is one in which the SL and the TL words

refer to the same thing in the real world This is the referential identity

between the SL and TL units It is related to equivalence of the extra linguistic content of a text or so called “content invariance”

Besides denotative value, SL and TL words or expression may

produce the same communicative value in the mind of native speakers of

the two languages In other words, it is the equivalence transmitted by specific choices between synonymous, expressions with respect to the style,

the social and geographical dimension or frequency Koller sees this type of equivalence (connotative equivalence) as elsewhere being referred to as

“stylistic equivalence”

Text-normative equivalence is related to text types, with different kinds of texts behaving in different ways It means that in the type, SL and

TL words use the same or similar text types in their respective languages

The type of equivalence that relates to the recipient or the reader of the translation, for whom the translation is specially designed, is called pragmatic or communicative equivalence Being applied the equivalence, SL

and TT words have the same effect on the readers

The concept of equivalence that relates to certain aesthetic, formal and

idiosyncratic characteristics of the source text is called formal equivalence

4 Translation of cultural terms:

According to Newmark, culture can be considered to be “the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression.” In addition, each single ethnic community has its own unique culture that cannot be seen in any others Therefore, culture‟s expression, language is different from this community to another In other words, there is an actual existence of

“cultural terms” of a language that is distinct to another; or as Harvey (2000, p2-6) defined cultural bound terms as the terms which “refer to concepts, institutions and personnel which are specific to the SL culture” This fact leads translators to face on dealing with cultural specific words which are,

according to Newmark, “untranslatable and not to be translated” due to the cultural “gap” and “distance” between the source and target language

Adapting Nida, Newmark also categorized cultural-bound words and offers some typical examples as follows:

“honeysuckle”, “tundra”, “pampas”, etc

transport and communications: “zabaglione”, “sake”,

“anorak”, “kambong”, “Moulton”, etc

political and administrative, social, legal, religious, artistic:

“temple”, “dharma”, “karma”, etc

language): “cock a snook”, “spitting”, etc

He also mentioned contextual factors for translation process that translator should consider in order to be able to produce an adequate translation for the cultural terms They are:

readership

- Future of referent

As one of the translation problems, translation of cultural specific terms has grasped the deep concern of not only Newmark but also quite a few translation scholars and theorists In the attempt of finding adequate procedures to conduct an “accurate, clear and natural” translation for cultural elements, translation professors have devoted their suggestions to approach and deal with them They all share the same idea that in order to choose a suitable procedure, translator should consider seriously three factors which are “the particular text-type”, “the requirement of the readership or the client” and “the importance of the cultural world in the text” (Larson, 1984) However, from that, each opposed distinct procedures from others

concepts which are:

translating it

same “relevance” as the SL term

To Nico Wiersema, as he presented in his essay “Globalization and Translation”, there are three options for the translation of cultural elements

as below:

- Rewriting the text to make it more comprehensible to the TL

audience

Meanwhile, with general considerations on solutions to deal with cultural bound terms and bridge the cultural gap between two languages, Newmark offered two translation procedures “at the opposite ends of the scale” (Newmark, 1988, p.96): transference and componential analysis which is “comparing an SL word with a TL word which has a similar meaning but is not an obvious one-to-one equivalent, by demonstrating first their common and then their differing sense components” (Newmark, 1988, p.114) Ten more procedures introduced are:

non-authoritative texts, especially metaphors and intensifiers)

or generalize the whole research population when the population is too large

Samples were collected from four books, Vietnam, The Revolutionary Path (Thomas Hodgkin), Vietnam and the Chinese model (Alexander Barton Woodside), Land equalization in 1893 in Binh Dinh seen from the land

records (Phan Phuong Thao) and Historical characters of the Dinh-Le dynasties (Truong Dinh Tuong) These books are of relative authentic and

assessment-worthy because they are written by experts in Vietnamese history or translated by qualified translators Moreover, it was published and guaranteed by Thế Giới Publisher, a prestigious and well-known publishing house in the field of publishing versions translated from Vietnamese language into others and vice-versa

The process of collecting samples contains two main steps The first one was seeking Vietnamese history books which contain samples of Vietnamese feudal titles in libraries of University of Foreign Languages and International Studies as well as National Library of Vietnam Then, all satisfied translations of Vietnamese feudal titles in each book were selected and quoted in the sentence level and transferred into soft copy

2 Data analysis process:

The first step to approach the study was reading the English written and translated versions to count the number of samples and classify them into different translation procedures The purpose of this step was to answer the first research question that is finding out the frequency of use of translation procedures in rendering Vietnamese feudal titles into English

After that, the researcher compared Vietnamese original versions of the samples and translated ones; then based on theory on translation of culture specific terms to identify the strong and weak points of applying each procedure Finishing this step, the researcher would answer the second research question; therefore, some suggestions for translating English-Vietnamese feudal titles could be made

Finally, in order to answer the third research question, the researcher took some popular titles that had more than one options to be translated in serious consideration and did a critical study on them With the aid from many documents on Vietnamese history as well as linguistics, the researcher offered some notifications when translating those titles

Chapter 4:

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Theory on culture specific terms presented in chapter 2 approves that the participants of the research, Vietnamese feudal titles are cultural terms Specifically, the participants suit the definition of Harvey as “personnel which are specific to the SL language” Moreover, according to Newmark‟s classification of culture bound words, the participants can be considered

“political and administrative concepts” and belong to the forth type,

“Organization, Customs, Activities, Procedures and Concepts” As Mona

Baker mentioned in her book, In Other Words, the culture specific concepts

are one of common problems of non-equivalence at word level that translators have to face on The professor also stated that “different kinds of non- equivalence require different strategies” (1992)

Therefore, in this chapter, the researcher would like to employ the theory on culture specific words and their translations as presented in chapter II, Literature Review as a basis to analyze and evaluate translation procedures which have been so far applied to translate a specific group of cultural terms, Vietnamese feudal titles

1 An overview of translation procedures applied to translate Vietnamese feudal titles into English:

In the four chosen books, Vietnam, The Revolutionary Path (Hodgkin, 1981), Vietnam and the Chinese model (Woodside, 1971), Land equalization

in 1893 in Binh Dinh seen from the land records (Phan, 2009) and Historical characters of the Dinh-Le dynasties (Truong, 2008), 132 of Vietnamese

feudal titles were translated into English with 645 times in total According

to Newmark‟s categorization of translation procedures, the translated titles

fall into five types: transference, naturalization, cultural equivalent,

neutralization (i.e functional and descriptive equivalent) and couplet

Chart 1: Frequency of using translation procedures applied to

translate Vietnamese feudal titles

As can be seen, with 274 times, cultural equivalent enjoyed the first

rank of being applied to translate Vietnamese feudal titles It proves that

facing the Vietnamese culture titles, translators tried to find English cultural

expressions that are considered equivalent to render them Besides cultural

equivalent, translators seem to prefer couplet to transfer the titles into

English This procedure was adopted 201 times Two main couples in this

type are transference or naturalization – cultural equivalent and transference

or naturalization – neutralization The third place belongs to neutralization

with 82 times, occupying nearly 13% of the total number of times The

difference in government structure is the possible reason why translators

have to use culture-free expression in translations of Vietnamese feudal titles

or sometimes explain the meaning of the titles in several words The rest proportion is owned by two procedures in which the original words are adopted for the translation with no explanation, transference and naturalization with 68 and 20 times respectively

In short, out of twelve translation procedures that Newmark suggested

to translate culture specific terms, five were employed by both English authors and Vietnamese translators to deal with Vietnamese feudal titles They are organized in ascending order of times used to translate Vietnamese feudal titles as cultural equivalent (274), couplet (201), neutralization (82), transference (68) and naturalization (20) After giving specific statistics of the frequency of the translation procedures applied to translate Vietnamese feudal titles, the researcher would like to provide readers with an insight into the strong and weak points of adopting each procedure which would be presented in detail in the following part

2 Advantages and disadvantages when using the chosen translation procedures to translate Vietnamese feudal titles into English:

2.1 Translation procedure: cultural equivalent

Theoretically, this procedure involves replacing a culture bound word with a TL one which does not have the identical propositional meaning but

is likely to have a similar influence on the reader

Below are some examples of English cultural equivalent titles for Vietnamese ones

Vietnamese titles English translation

Table 1: examples of applying cultural equivalent

The main advantage of using this strategy is that it gives the reader a concept with which he or she can identify in his or her own culture, something familiar and appealing Because both the original terms and the translated ones share the same denotative meaning, the reader can understand the text immediately without having to consult dictionaries or related documents It also possibly prevents the reader from confusing or misunderstanding the meaning of the titles This procedure makes the translation clearer and more natural

For example, when approaching sentences like “Nguyễn Nhạc

proclaimed himself Emperor in 1776, naming his reign Thái Đức” (Nguyễn Nhạc tự xưng Hoàng đế (1776), lấy hiệu Thái Đức) or “In 977, King Đinh

Bộ Lĩnh made his son Hạng Lang Crown Prince and his second son Toàn

Vệ Vương” (Năm 977, vua lập con trai là Hạng Lang làm Hoàng Thái tử,

con thứ là Toàn làm Vệ Vương), the reader can acknowledge immediately that Nguyễn Nhạc was the person who reigned Đại Việt (the former name of Vietnam under the Tây Sơn period) and Hạng Lang was one of King Đinh

Bộ Lĩnh‟s son who was appointed to become King when the King Đinh Bộ Lĩnh died

However, this procedure requires a rich knowledge of both English and Vietnamese culture and history from translator In order to make translations meet the requirement of accuracy, translators must thoroughly understand the content of feudal titles of both England and Vietnam Otherwise, it could result in pairs of vaguely matched titles that possibly confuse or even mislead readers

2.2 Translation procedure: Neutralization

Although cultural equivalent was so far the procedure used most, most

of times it was applied only for some popular titles such as Vua, Hoàng đế, Hoàng Hậu, Công chúa or Hoàng tử Meanwhile, because of different government systems, most of Vietnamese feudal titles have no cultural equivalent in English To those, translators applied neutralization including functional and descriptive equivalent Moreover, the way of using culture-free words to render the “untranslatable” titles seems to overwhelm the option of explaining in several words because among 82 times neutralization were used, descriptive equivalent occupies only 3 times

Some examples are shown at the table below

Vietnamese titles English translation

Table 2: examples of applying functional equivalent

With the translations applied neutralization, readers also appreciate the connotation of the titles and the role of Vietnamese feudal mandarins as well However, in order to choose an appropriate English title for a Vietnamese feudal one, translators must comprehend the positions of Vietnamese feudal mandarins thoroughly For example, “tuần phủ” is the person who leads the rule regime over province, the same function with

“provincial governor” In addition, normally, English people appreciate the term “president” to refer the person who is in charge of an organization Therefore, facing the phrase “Vũ Xuân Cẩn, President of the Board of Justice” as translation of “Vũ Xuân Cẩn, Thượng thư bộ Hình”, reader can probably acknowledge the status of Vũ Xuân Cẩn directly and correctly

2.3 Translation procedure: Transference

With transference, translators have to do nothing but transplanting the

SL terms in the translated version Therefore, some people opine that transference makes the translator visible and it is not a translation procedure

at all However, Newmark not only considers it a translation procedure but also the best one to offer “local color and atmosphere” and preserve cultural names and concepts

The below are some typical examples of transference in the four chosen books

was Đô hộ phủ sĩ sư”

Điện tiền Đô chỉ huy sứ”

to bring 30.000 militia to construct a road from Ái district to Địa lý district”

commander and then promoted him to Điện tiền chỉ huy sứ or Thân vệ Tướng quân”

chính Thượng phụ Quốc công and offered him private land in Sơn Nam (present-day Thái Bình, Nam Định)”

Uẩn (who later overthrew the Anterior Lê Dynasty and became the first King of the glorious Lý Dynasty)”

- “In 974, the Song be Giao Chỉ District Lord (Giao chỉ Quận

Vương), Đinh Liễn to be Tĩnh hải quân Tiết độ sứ An nam đô hộ.”

Chính đô đốc under Ngô Nam Tấn Vương‟s reign

From these samples, it can be assumed that long titles and titles expressing more than one position were often kept their original forms in the translations Because these titles are fairly unfamiliar to foreign people, they would potentially interrupt the full flow of the reader‟s reading with looking

up their meaning

Besides, as that it is possibly rather hard for the translators to find a more appropriate way to express some long and complicated titles like Phụ dực Quốc chính Thượng phụ Quốc công or Tĩnh hải quân Tiết độ sứ An nam

đô hộ than transference, the translators may use transference with the purpose of expressing unique Vietnamese culture and showing their respects

to it Furthermore, in his essay, “Globalization and Translation”, Nico stated that following the trend of globalization, transference would help to make cultures closer

In addition, transference also helps the readership to identify these titles in other texts without any difficulty Nowadays, thanks to the advance

of information technology, should the translation be challenging for the reader, he or she can utilize the Internet to understand the terms fully

2.4 Translation procedure: couplet

The result from the process of the analyzing data shows that couplet is the second choice after cultural equivalent that the translators took to deal with translating Vietnamese feudal titles into English Specifically, the procedures were applied 201 times out of 645 times in total Two main specific couples included in the procedure are transference or naturalization and functional equivalent and transference or naturalization and cultural equivalent

68%

Naturalization Functional equiv.

-Transference/ Naturalization - Cultrural equiv.

Chart 2: Two main couples of translation procedures applied to

translate Vietnamese feudal titles

It is noted that most of the time, transference/ naturalization were combined with functional equivalent This option seizes about 68% of the total times couplet applied by translators The rest belongs to the grouping of transference or naturalization and cultural equivalent

Here are some examples of couplet, transference/ naturalization and functional equivalent

- “His father was Đinh Công Trứ, a canton chief (Thứ sử) of

Hoan Châu district (Nghệ An province) under the reigns of Dương Đình Nghệ (930-937) and Ngô Quyền (939-944)”

(the second highest-ranking literacy mandarin) Ngụ Hoàn Nghĩa raised Lê Thước to the high position of their teacher”

under Tiết độ sứ (The Governor) Dương Đình Nghệ, who assinated Dương Đình Nghệ to usurp the post of Tiết độ sứ”

President of the Board of Justice (Thượng Thư bộ hình), and Doãn Uẩn, Deputy President of the Board of Finance (Hữu

tham tri bộ hộ) to Bình Định to carry out land equalization”

officials, 6 vice-director (viên ngoại lang), 6 secretaries (chủ

sự) together with 4 clerks of grades 8 and 9”

Protector (Tham hiệp) of Hưng Hóa protectorate”

administrators, known as Lac hau, and military administrators,

- “After ascending the throne, Lý Công Uẩn bestowed Quốc

công title (the Grand Duke) upon Nguyễn Đê and Nghĩa Tín Hầu title (the Marquis) upon Đào Cam Mộc.”

the title “Lord” (Vương) and land on all his sons”

regent power”

As the combination of transcription and cultural or functional equivalent, couplet seems to become a procedure that both utilizes strong points of the two and avoids their limitations also Therefore, translation by transcription showed high appreciation to SL culture and the addition parts (functional or cultural equivalent) helped to avoid misunderstanding and ambiguity As both SL titles and their translation are available, the reader would know their spelling and their meaning as well

Preserving the form of Vietnamese specific-culture titles and adding further explanation as cultural or functional equivalent is very helpful when the titles are repeated several times in the text In the four books, most of the time, this procedure was applied as the first time the title mentioned Later, once it was identified and explained, the title could be then used in its own The reader could understand it and not be distracted by further explanation

3 Some notifications:

Collecting and analyzing samples from four different books written by four different authors provided the researcher with a chance to observe several different translation options for one Vietnamese feudal title and vice

versa With the purpose of sharing with the readers some notifications when translating some specific titles of Vietnamese mandarin‟s or members of royal family, the researcher would identify the differences and some possible causes

Hoàng đế/ Vua – Emperor/King

Vietnamese people often think there is no big difference between Hoàng đế and Vua However, in English, according to the Oxford Advanced

Learner‟s Dictionary, emperor is “a man who rules an empire (a group of

countries that is governed by one country)” while king is “the make ruler of

an independent state that has a royal family” Therefore, there are two

English versions as below

his reign Thái Đức”,

Quang Trung”,

prefectures”

realized that after the Tây Sơn uprising”

annihilate enemy”

Theoretically, if “Vietnam” is considered an independent country, its ruler under the feudal regime should be called King However, in fact,