Nghiên cứu cách dịch việt anh các phụ đề hiện vật tại bảo tang dân tộc học việt nam

HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

DEPARTMENT OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

Nguyễn Thị Nhàn

A STUDY ON THE VIETNAMESE-ENGLISH

TRANSLATION OF EXHIBIT LABELS IN THE

VIETNAM MUSEUM OF ETHNOGRAPHY

(Nghiên cứu cách dịch Việt-Anh các phụ đề hiện vật

tại bảo tàng dân tộc học Việt Nam)

M.A.THESIS

Field: Linguistics

Code: 5.04.09

Hanoi, 2005

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HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

DEPARTMENT OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

Nguyễn Thị Nhàn

A STUDY ON THE VIETNAMESE-ENGLISH

TRANSLATION OF EXHIBIT LABELS IN THE

VIETNAM MUSEUM OF ETHNOGRAPHY

(Nghiên cứu cách dịch Việt-Anh các phụ đề hiện vật

tại bảo tàng dân tộc học Việt Nam)

By: Nguyễn Thị Nhàn

Supervisor: Dr. Trần Xuân Điệp

Hanoi, 2005

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PART I. INTRODUCTION

I. RATIONALE

In Vietnam as well as in every country of the world, museums have been open to help

people understand and appreciate the natural world, the history of civilizations, and the

record of humanity’s artistic, scientific, and technological achievements. Museums exhibit

objects of scientific, aesthetic, or historical importance for the purposes of public education

and the advancement of knowledge. The Vietnam Museum of Ethnography founded in

1997 is a cultural and scientific center. It studies, collects, classifies, preserves, restores

and exhibits cultural and historical values of all ethnic groups in Vietnam. People visit the

museum not only to amuse themselves but also to study ethnic groups as well as various

cultural values of Vietnamese people. Therefore, people from all over the country as well

as foreign visitors, scientists as well as students can find interesting things in here. For the

purpose of welcoming foreign visitors, all the exhibit labels are written in Vietnamese and

then translated into English and French.

The translation of exhibit labels is not at all an easy process as many concepts about the

life of ethnic people in Vietnam do not have equivalents in the English language. The

translators have to use lots of translation strategies in transferring the concepts in a way

that is the most understandable to foreign visitors. However, the translators also have some

difficulties in translating the concepts for the problem of non-equivalence at word level.

So far, little research on the Vietnamese – English translation of exhibit labels has been

done. Therefore, an investigation on the Vietnamese – English translation of exhibit labels

in the Vietnam Museum of Ethnography is really necessary. In the hope for some

suggestions of implications that can be of some use to those who are responsible for

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translating exhibit labels in the Vietnam Museum of Ethnography as well as in other

museums, the author would like to carry out this minor thesis to answer the question: What

are the translation strategies and procedures used in the translation of exhibit labels in the

Vietnam Museum of Ethnography (VME)?

II. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

There are several types of exhibit labels in a museum: title or headline labels giving the

title of an exhibit; primary or introductory labels providing an overview or introduction to

the exhibit; secondary or text labels giving an intermediate level of information between an

introductory label and the more specific object labels; and object labels providing

information, such as description or title, date or age, artist or user, material composition,

and sometimes a brief text on a particular object. This study limits itself to the analysis of

the Vietnamese-English translation of object labels in the Vietnam Museum of

Ethnography in Hanoi.

III. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

This study aims at:

• Analysing the strategies and procedures used in the translation of exhibit labels

from Vietnamese to English in the Vietnam Museum of Ethnography.

• Working out the difficulties of translation process that the translators in the

museum may have.

• Giving some suggestions for the problems.

IV. METHODS OF THE STUDY

To accomplish this thesis, we will go through a number of materials on translation studies

to build up a theoretical background for the research. Then, as it was stated in the aims and

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