(Luận văn thạc sĩ) grammatical cohesionin “ the wind in the willow” by kenneth grahame and their equivalents in google translate’svietnamese translations

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
QUY NHON UNIVERSITY

LÊ THỊ NGỌC THẢO

GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN “THE WIND IN THE
WILLOWS” BY KENNETH GRAHAME AND THEIR

h

EQUIVALENTS IN GOOGLE TRANSLATE’S
VIETNAMESE TRANSLATIONS
FIELD: English Linguistics
CODE: 8.22.02.01

Supervisor: LÊ NHÂN THÀNH, Ph.D.


BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO
TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN

LÊ THỊ NGỌC THẢO

LIÊN KẾT NGỮ PHÁP TRONG “GIÓ QUA RẶNG LIỄU”
CỦA KENNETH GRAHAME VÀ TƯƠNG ĐƯƠNG
TRONG BẢN DỊCH TIẾNG VIỆT CỦA GOOGLE

h

TRANSLATE
Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh

Mã số: 8.22.02.01

Người hướng dẫn: TS. LÊ NHÂN THÀNH


i

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP
I confirm that the thesis “Grammatical cohesion in “The Wind in the
Willow” by Kenneth Grahame and their equivalents in Google Translate’s
Vietnamese Translations” is my work except where reference is made in the text of
the thesis. No other person’s work has been used without acknowledgement in the
thesis.
This thesis has not been submitted elsewhere for the award of any degree or
diploma.

Binh Dinh, 2021

h
Lê Thị Ngọc Thảo


ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis was completed with the support of many people. First and
foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Le Nhan Thanh,
my supervisor, for his patience, guidance and professional advice during the
process of completing this thesis. Without his expertise and encouragement, I
would not have been able to finish this study.

I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to all my lecturers who have
taken part in my MA course at Quy Nhon University and provided me with
useful and interesting knowledge and experience as well as their inspiration
which helped me conduct my research.
Last but not least, I feel deeply indebted to my family members for
their support and motivation whenever I needed to finish the thesis.

h


iii

ABSTRACT
The study aims to examine the quality of Google Translate’s
Vietnamese translations of the grammatical cohesive devices in “The Wind in
the Willow” by Kenneth Grahame in terms of translation errors. To fulfil this
aim, 10934 reference ties and 770 conjunction ties found in 2306 English
sentences containing the references and conjunctions in “The Wind in the
Willow” and their equivalents in GT’s Vietnamese translations were
examined to classify the translation errors in the Vietnamese translations in
terms of grammatical cohesion using Costa et al.’s (2015) model. The
research employs both quantitative and qualitative content analysis in this
study to collect data and analyze it to answer the research questions. The
results of the study show that GT cannot achieve accuracy in translating the

h

references with contextual meaning and GT shows better quality in translating
the conjunctions than the references.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS
STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP ................................................................... i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................. ii
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................... iii
ABBREVIATIONS......................................................................................... vii
LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................... ix
LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................... xi
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................... 1
1.1. Rationale ................................................................................................. 1
1.2. Aim and Objectives................................................................................. 3
1.2.1. Aim ................................................................................................... 3
1.2.2. Objectives ......................................................................................... 3

h

1.3. Research Questions ................................................................................. 4
1.4. Scope of the Study .................................................................................. 4
1.5. Significance of the Study ........................................................................ 5
1.6. Organization of the Study ....................................................................... 5
CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................... 7
2.1. The Theory of Cohesion ......................................................................... 7
2.1.1. Definition of cohesion. ..................................................................... 7
2.1.2. Grammatical cohesion. ..................................................................... 8
2.1.3. Previous studies. ............................................................................. 29
2.2. Errors in translation............................................................................... 33
2.2.1. Definition of translation errors ....................................................... 33
2.2.2. Classification of translation errors. ................................................. 33

2.2.3. Conceptual Framework. .................................................................. 36
2.3. Google Translate ................................................................................... 42


v

2.3.1. Machine translation......................................................................... 43
2.3.2. Overview of Google Translate........................................................ 44
2.3.3. Previous studies on Google Translate............................................. 47
CHAPTER 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ............................................ 51
3.1. Research Methods ................................................................................. 51
3.2. Data Collection ..................................................................................... 56
3.3. Data Analysis ........................................................................................ 60
CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION ............................................ 64
4.1. References and Conjunctions in “The Wind in the Willows” and
their Equivalents in GT’s Vietnamese Translations. ................................... 64
4.1.1. Types of references ......................................................................... 64
4.1.2. Types of conjunctions ..................................................................... 71
4.2. Types of Translation Errors .................................................................. 78

h

4.2.1. Semantic errors. .............................................................................. 79
4.2.2. Lexis errors. .................................................................................... 82
4.2.3. Orthographic errors. ........................................................................ 84
4.2.4. Grammar errors. .............................................................................. 85
4.2.5. Discourse errors. ............................................................................. 85
4.2.6. No translation errors. ...................................................................... 86
4.3. The Quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of
English Grammatical Cohesive Devices...................................................... 87

CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION ........................................................................ 90
5.1. Summary of the main Findings ............................................................. 90
5.2. Limitation of the Study ......................................................................... 93
5.3. Implication of the Study........................................................................ 93
5.3.1. Implication for teachers and students of translation. ...................... 93
5.3.2. Implication for translators. .............................................................. 94


vi

5.4. Suggestions for Future Research .......................................................... 94
REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 95
APPENDICES

h


vii

ABBREVIATIONS
(a) Abbreviation
Abbreviation

Definition
Conjunction: additive

C.av

Conjunction: adversative

C.ca

Conjunction: causal

C.te

Conjunction: temporal

DE

Discourse errors

DER

Discourse errors of references

GE

Grammar errors

GEC

Grammar errors of conjunctions

GER

Grammar errors of references

GT

Google Translate

LE

Lexis errors

LEC

Lexis errors of conjunctions

LER

Lexis errors of references

MT

Machine translation

NMT

Neural machine translation

OE

Orthographic errors

OEC

Orthographic error of conjunctions

OER

Orthographic error of references

R.co

Reference: comparative

R.de

Reference: demonstrative

R.pe

Reference: personal

SE

Semantic errors

SEC

Semantic errors of conjunctions

h

C.ad


viii

SER

Semantic errors of references

SMT

Statistical machine translation

(b) Conventions
In the text:
ITALICS are used for emphasis, examples or technical terms; BOLD
words are used to mark the first use of technical terms.
In numbered examples:
BOLD and UNDERLINED words in examples are the features under
discussion.

h


ix

LIST OF TABLES
Names of tables

Page

Table 2.1

Comparative Reference Items

15

Table 2.2

Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Additive
Type

18

Table 2.3

Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the
Adversative Type

34

Table 2.4

Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Causal
Type

23

Table 2.5

Summary of the Conjunctive Relation of the Temporal
Type

26

Table 2.6

Error Categories

35

Table 2.7

The Framework for the Analysis of Reference Items

37

Table 2.8

The Framework for the Analysis of Conjunction

38

Table 2.9

Identifiable Characteristics of Translation Errors

41

h

Number

Table 2.10 109 Languages Supported by Google Translate

45

Table 3.1

The Sample Table on the Frequencies of Reference in
“The Wind in the Willow” and Their Equivalents in
Google Translate’s Vietnamese Translations

60

Table 3.2

The Sample Table on the Frequencies of Conjunction
in “The Wind in the Willow” and Their Equivalents in
Google Translate’s Vietnamese Translations

61

Table 3.3

The Sample Table on the Frequencies of Each
Translation Error Type of Grammatical Cohesive
Devices

62

Table 3.4

The Sample Table in Translation Errors committed by

Google Translate according to Grammatical Cohesive
Devices

63

Table 4.1

The Frequencies of Reference in “The Wind in the
Willow” and Their Equivalents in Google Translate’s
Vietnamese Translations

65


x

Number

Names of tables

Page

Table 4.2

The Occurrences of Conjunction in “The Wind in the
Willow” and Their Equivalents in GT’s Vietnamese
Translations

72

Table 4.3

The Frequencies of Each Error Type of Grammatical
Cohesive Devices in Google Translate’s Vietnamese
Translations

79

Table 4.4

The Number of Occurrences of the Four Kinds of the
Semantic Errors

80

Table 4.5

The Number of Occurrences of the Three Kinds of
Lexis Errors

83

Table 4.6

The Number of Occurrences of the Three Kinds of the
Orthographic Errors

84

Table 4.7

Translation Errors committed by GT according to
Grammatical Cohesive Devices

87

h


xi

LIST OF FIGURES
Number

Names of figures

Page

Figure 2.1 Exophoric and Endophoric Reference

9

Figure 2.2 Google Translate Graphical User Interface

47

Figure 3.1 The Interface of Word 2010 with the Navigation Pane

58

Figure 4.1

Translation Errors committed by GT according to
Grammatical Cohesive Devices

88

h


1

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
Among subfields of discourse analysis, cohesion has received a lot of
special attention from linguists and researchers such as Halliday (1964),
Hasan (1968), Gleason (1968), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Gutwinski (1976),
Martin (1992), and many others. Although there are a lot of models of
cohesion, the framework suggested by Halliday and Hasan (1976) in
Cohesion in English has been considered as the most influential model of
cohesion. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion refers to “the
linguistic means whereby texture is achieved” (p. 293). In other words,
cohesion in a text is used as a means to connect or relate one sentence to the
text semantically so that it is understood. Therefore, many researchers have

h

focused on cohesion of news, stories, reports, or editorials (Hameed, 2008;
Hidayat, 2016; Sudani, Tika & Sudana, 2017, among others.). However, only
a few have studied and compared the grammatical cohesive devices in an

English novel and their Vietnamese equivalents in Google Translate's
translations. Fewer studies concern the study of evaluating the quality of
Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations of the English novel in terms of
the grammatical cohesive devices.
Google Translate (GT) is a popular tool for free online machine
translation developed by Google and is regarded as a portable personal
translator with millions of users in the world. It can translate multiple forms
of texts and media such as words, phrases, websites, speech, and even moving
images from one language into 109 other languages. Although GT has been
improved a lot from statistical machine translation to neural machine
translation to make better and accurate translations, it has still not been


2

perfect with some limitations. Therefore, a lot of researchers from different
fields around the world have carried out many studies relating to GT. For
example, Aiken and Balan (2011) with the article An Analysis of Google
Translate Accuracy, Patil and Davies (2014) in Use of Google Translate in
medical communication: Evaluation of accuracy, Anggaira and Hadi (2017)
with Linguistic Errors On Narrative Text Translation using Google
Translate, Kol, Schcolnik, and Spector-Cohen (2018) in the article Google
Translate in Academic Writing Courses, and Aiken with the article entitled An
Updated Evaluation of Google Translate Accuracy (2019). In Vietnam, there
are also some researches discussing GT such as Nguyen Minh Trang (2019)
with Using Google Translate As a Pronunciation Training Tool and Nguyen
Thi Ngoc Giau (2019) with her Master’s thesis named Evaluating the Quality
of English – Vietnamese Translation carried out by Google Translate.

h

I have been very interested in The Wind in the Willows, a children’s
book by British novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Since its
beginnings as a series of stories told to Kenneth Grahame’s young son, The
Wind in the Willows has become one of the most favourite children’s books of
all time. The novel is about the adventures of four anthropomorphised animals
- Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger, which have enchanted readers of all ages,
especially children for more than a century. Since the first publication,
Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece has been issued in over a hundred editions
and translated into many languages. It can be read in Afrikaans as Die Wind
in die Wilgers, in Italian as Il Vento nei Salici, in Finnish as Kaislikossa
suhisee, in Portuguese as As Aventuras de Senhor Sapo and in dozens of other
languages. This famous novel also has translations in verse, audio and video
adaptations, plays, films, picture books, pop-up books, knitting patterns,
graphic novels and scholarly annotated editions. Therefore, The Wind in the


3

Willows by Kenneth Grahame is a good data resource for my study.
With the aim to evaluate the quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese
translations of the English grammatical cohesive devices, this study attempts
to make a comparative analysis of the grammatical devices used in The Wind
in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and their Vietnamese equivalents
translated by Google Translate. When studying it, we not only focus on the
kinds of grammatical devices based on the framework of Halliday and Hasan
(1976) but also try to find out the translation errors in the Vietnamese
translation made by Google Translate to see which kind of grammatical
cohesive devices Google Translate translates more accurately. That is the
reason why I choose the topic “Grammatical cohesion in ‘The Wind in the

Willow’ by Kenneth Grahame and their equivalents in Google Translate’s
Vietnamese Translations”.

h

1.2. Aim and Objectives
1.2.1. Aim

This study aims to examine the quality of Google Translate’s
Vietnamese translations of the grammatical cohesive devices in “The Wind in
the Willow” by Kenneth Grahame in terms of translation errors.
1.2.2. Objectives
In order to achieve this aim, the researcher:
- identified the types of grammatical cohesive devices in “The Wind in
the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame,
- identified the Vietnamese equivalents in Google Translate’s
translations of the English grammatical cohesive devices, and
- examined the translation errors in the Vietnamese translations of the
grammatical cohesive devices to see which type of the English grammatical
cohesive devices Google Translate translates more accurately.


4

1.3. Research Questions
To achieve the above aim and objectives, the researcher collected data
and analyzed it to answer the following questions:
1. What kinds of grammatical cohesive devices are used in "The Wind
in the Willow" by Kenneth Grahame?
2. What are the Vietnamese equivalents of these grammatical cohesive

devices in Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations?
3. What kinds of translation errors are committed in Google Translate’s
Vietnamese translations of these grammatical cohesive devices?
4. Which kind of grammatical cohesive devices does Google Translate
translate more correctly?
1.4. Scope of the Study
According to Halliday and Hasan (1976, p. 6), grammatical cohesive

h

devices are divided into four sub-types, which are reference, ellipsis,
substitution, and conjunction. However, within limited time and research
conditions, the study only focused on the references and conjunctions which
are found a lot in “The Wind in the Willow” by Kenneth Grahame. Based on
the framework of Halliday and Hasan (1976) in Cohesion in English, the
researcher investigated the grammatical cohesive devices including the
references and conjunctions in the novel “The Wind in the Willow” by
Kenneth Grahame and their equivalents in Google Translate’s Vietnamese
translations.

Additionally,

the

researcher

compared

references

and

conjunctions in “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame with their
equivalents in Vietnamese translations made by Google Translate to classify
translation errors in the Vietnamese translations in terms of grammatical
cohesive devices according to Costa et al.’s (2015) model that divides errors
into five main linguistic categories (Orthography, Lexis, Grammar, Semantics


5

and Discourse). After classifying translation errors, the researcher evaluated
the quality of Google Translate’s Vietnamese translations in terms of the
grammatical cohesive devices by pointing out which of these two
grammatical cohesive devices is translated more accurately by Google
Translate.
1.5. Significance of the Study
The study makes significant contributions to both theory and practice.
For theoretical aspects, the result of this study offers useful knowledge
of references and conjunctions in “The Wind in the Willow” by Kenneth and
Google Translate’s Vietnamese translation. Besides, this research also brings
about insights into errors in these two kinds of grammatical cohesive devices
made by Google Translate in its Vietnamese translations of “The Wind in the
Willows” by Kenneth Grahame.

h

For practical aspects, after analyzing errors in the references and
conjunctions committed by Google Translate, the study helps teachers,
students and translators know which of these two cohesive devices is

translated more correctly by Google Translate. Thanks to this, they will take
careful note when using Google Translate in their translating relating to the
grammatical cohesive devices.
1.6. Organization of the Study
This study is organized into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 (Introduction)
presents the rationale, aim and objectives, research questions, significance of
the study. Chapter 2 (Literature review) is concerned with the brief view of
theoretical background for the research including the theory of cohesion,
errors in translation, Google Translate, and the review of related previous
studies. Chapter 3 (Methods) addresses the methods employed in the selection
and the analysis of the data. Chapter 4 (Finding and discussions) reports and


6

discusses the results from the analysis and draw conclusions. Chapter 5
(Conclusion) closes the study with a discussion of the study’s results, some
implications for teachers, students and translators, its limitations and a few
recommendations for further study.

h


7

Chapter 2. LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter reviews related theories as the background for the analysis
and discussion of the data in the study. It is concerned with the theory of
cohesion, errors in translation, and Google Translate.
2.1. The Theory of Cohesion

This section covers the theory about cohesion consisting of the
definition of cohesion and grammatical cohesion.
2.1.1. Definition of cohesion.
In the Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (1996), cohesion is defined
as “the various linguistic means by which sentences ‘stick together’ and are
linked into larger units of paragraphs, or stanzas, or chapters” (p. 199).
Besides, according to Cook’s (1989) words, “formal links between

h

sentences and between clauses are known as cohesive devices” (p. 14).
Similarly, Yule (2010, p. 143) considers cohesion as “the ties and connections
that exist within texts”.
According to the definitions provided above, cohesion is a semantic
relation in a text that makes the text cohesive. Therefore, Halliday and
Hasan’s (1976) concept of cohesion in the book entitled Cohesion in English
seems to be the clearest.
The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to the
relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it
as a text. Cohesion occurs when the interpretation of some
element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one
element presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be
effectively decoded except by recourse to it. (Halliday & Hasan,
1976, p. 4)