Article info.

ABSTRACT

Received 19 Oct 2017
Revised 01 Dec 2017

Accepted 20 Jul 2018

This article reports a part of the bachelor graduation thesis (academic year of 2017) on the extent to which Can Tho University’s seniors majored in English Interpretation and Translation 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 translation-majored seniors faced in advertising translation and identify the strategies that they applied to overcome such challenges. Forty-one seniors majored in English Interpretation and Translation, Course 39 of Can Tho University, 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 idioms, addition with proper nouns and imperative mood, borrowing with proper noun, transposition with passive voice and noun phrases, and reduction with plural nouns. They did not, however, apply word-for-word translation to solve any difficulties in question. The findings of this study could help students become aware of their professional knowledge and skills so that they would employ appropriate ways of translation learning and practicing, and be well-prepared to work as translators, especially in the field of advertising translation.

Keywords

Advertising translation, English Interpretation and Translation-majored seniors, linguistic difficulties, printed informative advertisements, translation strategies

Cited as: Phuc, N.V. and Diep, T.T.N., 2018. Strategies used by English interpretation and translation-majored seniors to solve lin-guistic difficulties in English-Vietnamese advertising translation. Can Tho University Journal of Science. 54(5): 23-29.