AN ANALYSIS ON SEMANTICALLY TERMINOLOGICAL MISTAKES IN THE PAINT DOCUMENT TRANSLATION

PART I. INTRODUCTION

1. Rationale

In the process of worldwide industrialization, the needs for studying English become

more and more inevitable. Especially for the knowledge of the specific job, translators

must understand deeply all the skills of the job and must be ready for the translation into

second language if necessary.

In Vietnam, anyone coming into career, he or she must prepare all the knowledge of

job not only in Vietnamese but in English as well.

Deriving from translating technical documents of the paint company, the researcher

realizes the mistakes in translating paint documents which made by himself or by his

colleagues

Certainly, in order to get the skills of translation better, anyone who works as

translators should analyze thoroughly the mistakes and find out the solutions to correct and

avoid in the future.

2. Aims of study and research questions

Analysis on semantically terminological mistakes in the paint document translation

of specific purpose English is a very complicated matter for the researchers, especially for

the translators in the field of paint terminology in particular and in English in general. The

study aims at:

- Finding out the mistakes in translating paint terminology from English into

Vietnamese with the specific evidences.

- Suggesting the solutions to the problems to improve the current situation of

translating and avoid mistakes in the future.

Thanks to these ideas, the researcher will be aware of some suitable ways to avoid

the mistakes and correct themselves at work.

* Some research questions deducted from the study are as follows:

- What are the mistakes that the translators make when translating the documents?

- What are the solutions to these problems?

1

3. Scope of study

In this study, it is impossible to cover all the mistakes - concerning matters. The

researcher just focuses on the documents that he has been translated from English into

Vietnamese – basing on his experience on the paint document translation. And from

comparison with another 15 translators in 5 sheets of technical documents, the researcher

takes the most popular examples that he has observed, he recognizes three of the most

common mistakes in the translated documents as follows:

- At word level:

Resin (chất tạo màng) is a kind of gelled solution to be the main component of paint

constitution. (Someone translates resin into “nhựa”.)

Vehicle (chất mang, dung môi dẫn) = solvent + binder resin (Someone translates

vehicle into “phương tiện”.)

- At sentence level:

“Technology of Haiphong Paint is under the license of Chugoku-Japan.”

Vietnamese sentence must be “Công nghệ Hải Phòng bản quyền của hãng Chugoku –

Nhật Bản”, but some translators take in Vietnamese as “Công nghệ của công ty Sơn Hải

Phòng là theo li xăng của hãng Sơn Chugoku – Nhật Bản”.

- At paragraph level

“Of the paint researches that are important not just to the quality of paint but to

water environment, free copper and tin antifouling technologies are improved more and

more, which is the best way of reducing the fouls which hold under the marine vessels,

which are releasing activated biocides that creates antifouling process through the stages

of hydrolysis”. The result should be “Trong số những nghiên cứu về sơn quan trọng không

chỉ đối chất lượng sơn mà còn với môi trường biển, công nghệ chống hà không chứa hợp

chất cơ thiếc và đồng được chú trọng cải tiến. Phương pháp tốt nhất này là để giải các

chất chống hà và tạo nên quá trình chống hà thông qua các giai đoạn thủy phân”

The investigated issues in relation to the research are as follows:

- A general view of paint technical and other documents

2

- An analysis of the meanings of all the paint terminology and the mistakes created in

translation.

4. Methods of research

Initializing the study, the researcher take advantages of some methods which help

him do the research in the right direction. There are two methods the researcher uses are

survey coming from documents observation and statistics applied with analysis and

synthesis.

Encouraging two above methods, the researcher carries out the corresponding tasks

as

- Collecting and classifying examples and

- Comparing the usage of language between Vietnamese and English

5. Instruments for data collection, subjects

Deriving from the career, the researcher finds the subject of the study and makes an

effort to deal with. It is obvious that working as a translator of the paint documents, the

researcher has ever got the difficulties in the job. ”Mistakes and how to correct them in

translating”, which is the reason for the subject.

The two data collection instruments used in the study are Description of experience

and Description of observation.

* Description of experience

To fulfill this study, the researcher has worked at Haiphong Paint Join Stock

Company for over 3 years. The experience he can get is through such all the documents he

has done with in translation as Technical data sheets, paint specifications, catalogue, and

color collection cards, etc.

And some international documents which are related to the Paint Marketing and paint

checking are ASTM (American Standard for Testing Measurement), ISO (International

Standard Organization), and JIS (Japanese International Standard), TCVN (Vietnamese

Standard).

3