Strategies used by English interpretation and translation-majored seniors to solve lin-guistic difficulties in English-Vietnamese advertising translation

Abstract

This article reports a part of the bachelor graduation thesis (the academic year 2017) on the extent to which Can Tho University’s (CTU) English Interpretation and Translation (EIT) majored seniors can translate printed informative advertisements from English into Vietnamese. The purpose of the article was to rank the linguistic difficulties, particularly lexical and grammatical ones, that EIT majored seniors faced in advertising translation and identify the strategies they applied to overcome such challenges. Forty-one EIT majored seniors, Course 39 of CTU, were asked to translate two printed informative advertisements from English into Vietnamese within 90 minutes. The findings showed that regarding linguistic difficulties in translation, vocabulary was more problematic than grammar. In terms of translation strategies, the students used Equivalence to deal with Polysemy; Paraphrasing with Terminology and Idiom; Addition with Proper Noun and Imperative Mood; Borrowing with Proper Noun; Transposition with Passive Voice and Noun Phrase; and Reduction with Plural Noun. They did not, however, apply Word-for-word Translation to solve any difficulties in question. The results of this study could help students be aware of their professional knowledge and skills so that they can employ appropriate ways of translation learning and practicing and be well-prepared to work as translators, especially in the field of advertising translation.