An Evaluation of the Vietnamese Translated Version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong

An Evaluation of the Vietnamese Translated
Version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen
Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong


Nguyễn Thị Thu Hiền


Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ
Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: Ph.D. Phạm Thị Thanh Thùy
Năm bảo vệ: 2012


Abstract. It is undeniable that the assessment of translation is becoming of great
important and receiving great concerns of many researchers. The more translations are
published, the more necessary it is to control the quality of such works so that the
readers can enjoy the best of the foreign literature work via its translation. For that
reason, in this minor study, with a view to assess the quality of the translation of “The
Call of the Wild”, the researcher utilizes the schema of Translation Quality Assessment
proposed by New Mark. By this way, the researcher has found out that although the
translation text has achieved a lot of success in conveying the author’s message, it still
reveals some mismatches between the source text and the translated text. Noticeably,
some sentences in translated version do not transfer enough message in the original text
or the meaning occasionally changed. In addition, some vocabulary mistakes, printing
mistakes and punctuation mistakes which may affect the conciseness of the translation
are also pointed out. On the basis of such findings, some implications for literary
translation are drawn.

Keywords. Ngôn ngữ học; Tiếng Anh; Dịch thuật

Content
1. Rational for the study
Translation is an issue which attracts more and more attention from many people all over
the world. Nowadays, in the inevitable trend of globalization and integration, not only the
professional translators but also many people working in different fields such as health care,
economy, politics, etc, are concerned about the quality of translation. However, in fact, to have a
high-quality translation version, especially in the field of literature, is not an easy task and it
involves a lot of skills from the translators. According to the translator Thuy Toan(1993), to have
a good translation version, the translator must not only love his job and literature but also be
good at their mother tongue, know foreign languages, have a thorough knowledge of culture,
work cautiously and be industrious at consulting. From his point of view, it is clear that
translation is a challenging job, which requires the translator both the knowledge of the language
and the background knowledge of the culture which the literary works belongs to. Sometimes,
due to lack of either of these or because of the translator’s carelessness, the translated version
may not be concise enough. Even more seriously, it can transfer the wrong message that is
attached in the literary works. At present, in Vietnam, works of literary translations are growing
rapidly, even uncontrollably in quantity for commercial purposes ; however, there has been no
popular criterion for a good and valuable translated version . Besides the successfully -translated
masterpieces such as Wuthering Heights (Đi gi h ), Harry Porter, Noruwei no mori (Rư
̀
ng
Nauy), The Centaur in the Garden (Con nhân ma
̃
ơ
̉
trong vươ
̀
n ), there still exists ones of bad
quality, for example, the Vietnamese version of “The Da Vinci Code” (Mâ
̣

t ma
̃
Da Vinci ) by
translator Đo Thu Ha (Van Hoa-Thong Tin Publisher ,2006). This translation receives a lot of
criticism right from publication because of the mistakes that she should not have made in terms
of vocabulary, grammar and descriptions. For this reason, the minor thesis would like to focus on
the evaluation of one literary translation so that the readers can have better understanding of
some models of translation quality assessment initiated by some famous linguists in the world
like Nida and Taber, Peter Newmark, and J. House, etc.
Within the limitation of the minor thesis, only some of these models will be introduced,
and then, the model of Peter Newmark will be applied in evaluating the Vietnamese translated
version of “The Call of the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong, two great and
famous Vietnamese translators to point out both the strengths and weaknesses of translated texts
in comparison with the original. Also, the author would like to investigate the prominent
equivalence types the translator has achieved in translating this famous masterpiece so that other
translators can get some experiences from them.
2. Objective of the study
This thesis mainly aims at answering the three research questions:
 How good is the Vietnamese version of “The Call of the Wild” according to
Newmark’s model?
 What are the weaknesses of the translated version?
 What might be some lessons learned from the translation version?
3. Scope and method of the study
3.1 Scope of the study
The masterpiece “The Call of the Wild” includes of seven chapters in total. Due to the
limited time for this study, only Chapter Two of this short story will be chosen as the typical
analysis of the success and the shortcomings of two translators in translating this masterpiece
from English into Vietnamese. The title of this chapter is “The Law of Club and Fang” and the
reason why this chapter is chosen is that the writer has had access to this chapter since she was a
fourth year student. At that time, she had chances to learn about this chapter in the subject

“English Literature”, which attracts her a lot. Moreover, this is a moving chapter about the
process in which the dog adapts itself to the new harsh environment and rude owners. Therefore,
the writer decides to make a comparison between the original version and the translated one to
see whether the translators can transship both the connotative and denotative meaning of the
source text into the target text or not.
a. Method of the study
The goal of this study is to evaluate the quality of the translated version of “The Call of
the Wild” by Nguyen Cung Ai and Vu Tuan Phuong. To reach this goal, I decide to have an
insight into various translation quality assessment models by different authors, among which
Peter Newmark’s model is chosen as the main criteria for assessing the Vietnamese version of
this masterpiece because of its strong points in terms of application, that is, it is easy to follow.
During the assessing process, Contrastive Analysis approach will be applied to compare and
evaluate the translated version against the original one.
This assessing process will be carried out as follows. First, the original text will be read
thoroughly and comprehensively, then the source text will be compared to its translation under
the framework of NewMark’s TQA model. According to his model, there are five main steps
towards TQA and the researcher is going to strictly follow them:
 Step 1: A brief analysis of the SL text stressing its intention and its functional aspects
 Step 2: the translator’s interpretation of the SL text’s purpose, his translation method and
the translation’s likely readership
 Step 3: A selective but representative detailed comparison of the translation with the
original in terms of both sematics and syntactics
 Step 4: an evaluation of the translation: - (a) in the translator’s terms, (b) in the critic’s
terms, (c) as a piece of writing, independently of its original.
 Step 5: Where appropriate, an assessment of the likely place of the translation in the
target language culture or discipline.
4. Organization of the study
The study contains three main parts:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Development. This part includes two chapters:

Chapter 1: Literature Review
This part will discuss different basic aspects of translation, which is compulsory background
knowledge for any translation assessor who wishes to evaluate the quality of translation,
including definition of translation, translation methods and procedures, translation equivalence,
and translation assessment.
Chapter 2: Application of Newmark’s TQA model in evaluating Chapter Two of “The
Call of the wild”
In this chapter, Newmark’s five- step TQA model mentioned above will be applied in assessing
the Vietnamese version of chapter 2 in the works “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London.
Finally, part 3 will deal with the discussion of the results of this study and some conclusions will
be drawn.
The quality of the translation text including both translators’ strengths and weaknesses, which
are based on the application of the model, will be discussed. Also, some implications and
suggestions will be made for other translators, especially in the field of literature.


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̃
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̃
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