HUE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
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NGUYEN VAN TUAN
TRANSLATION 1&2
HUE - 2006
1
INTRODUCTION
An increasing number of universities in Vietnam have added courses in translation to their
curricula; however, the textbooks available for such courses are few. This unit has been
written with these courses in mind. The unit is designed to provide the learners with some
basic principles of translation which will be generally useful to translation courses in
universities and colleges, to help the learners avoid some errors they may encounter when they
translate a text, to provide the learners with essential English sentence patterns that could be
very useful for the learners in learning and practicing translating and to provide the learners 20
assignments related to the theory they have learned.
The desire of the author is to make available the principles of translation which have learned
through personal experience in translation and teaching translation, and through interaction
with colleagues involved in translation projects in many universities in Central Vietnam.
Since it is assumed that the students will be speakers of Vietnamese language, many of these
exercises involve translating from or into their mother tongue. The material is presented in a
way that it can be used in a self-teaching situation or in a classroom. An attempt has been
made to keep technical terms to a minimum. When technical vocabulary is used, every effort
is made to clarify the meaning of such vocabulary or to provide its meaning in Vietnamese.
This has been done so that the unit can be used by any student translator, even though his
exposure to linguistic and translation theory has been minimal.
This is an introductory unit. The lessons give an overview presenting the fundamental
principles of translation and the rest of the unit illustrates these principles. The overriding
principle is that translation is...