Grammatical metaphor in English official documentation: A corpus approach to the Vietnamese translation of nominalisation

This thesis aims to investigate grammatical metaphor in Vietnamese translations of English official documentation. Building on Halliday’s notion of grammatical metaphor and linguistic theories of translation shift, the thesis situates its argument in the broader context of translation theory and explores the various representations of grammatical metaphor in relation to Catford’s translation shifts. It adopts a corpus approach with the compilation of a 200,000-word English-Vietnamese parallel corpus, and focuses specifically on the translation of nominalisations formed with the suffixes ATION and MENT. The thesis draws on the Vietnamese translations to provide insights into metaphorical modes of expression via nominalisations-as-grammatical metaphor in official texts. The findings reveal the various types of metaphorical meanings embedded in nominalised forms. The identification of this range of metaphorical realisations can be interpreted along a cline from being more verb-like and denoting the Act category, to being more noun-like and denoting the Result category, or stretching along the cline and denoting the Process or Activity indicated in the verbal stem. The thesis supports the argument that several strategies which previous researchers have posited as universals are adopted in translating for adequate equivalence in metaphorisation. Some of these strategies like explicitation and simplification are found to be more powerful and more frequently used than others, and there are more explicitating and simplifying shifts in lexical rather than in syntactic or stylistic terms. Literal translation, though not commonly recognised as a translation universal, is found to be the most prevalent approach in the Vietnamese translation of ATION and MENT nominals in official texts. The thesis claims that the adoption of particular translation strategies generates corresponding translation shifts, and it is found that explicitation and simplification often entail shifts in level and in rank, and shifts in class often occur with shifts in structure. The findings reveal that shifts do not occur singly, but are often intertwined, and overlapping shifts are common in the Vietnamese translation. The thesis also proposes a graded continuum to justify congruence-incongruence shifts, and finally develops taxonomies of possible translation shifts involved in translating English N-GMs into Vietnamese. The findings are hoped to reveal several implications for the teaching about translation and for the practice of translating

An Investigation into Conceptual Metaphors of WATER in English and Vietnamese Poetry

This study is conducted with the aim of identifying conceptual metaphors of WATER in English and Vietnamese poetry. It seeks to find out the similarities and differences in the conceptualization of metaphors of WATER in the two languages; then suggest some implications for the teaching and learning process. In the study, descriptive, quantitative, qualitative approaches and a contrastive analysis are employed. 150 English and 150 Vietnamese samples are taken from a corpus of English and Vietnamese poems from the 19th and 20th centuries. The results show that ten conceptual metaphors of WATER in both English and Vietnamese are discovered within the scope of the study. Both English and Vietnamese poets make use of three types of poetic reworking of conventional metaphors, namely extending, elaboration, and combining. Since the meaning of a metaphor is influenced by culture and personal experiences, the concepts in the metaphors might differ significantly across Vietnamese and English cultures

Isolating Intensifiers in Verbal Processes Found in English Literary Discourse

Abstract: Isolating intensifiers are regarded as markers of the lexical-grammatical class denoting graduation. This category of language performs up-scaling or down-scaling of isolated and individual item solely so as to convey the level of intensity (Martin & White, 2005). The paper aims at exploring how isolating intensifiers upgrade and downgrade verbal processes found in English literary discourse. The study was conducted using qualitative method and basing on 120 samples extracted from the English literary works namely Wuthering Heights by Bronté, The Man of Property by Galsworthy, The moon and Sixpence by Maugham and Vanity Fair by Thackeray. The findings show that the isolating intensifiers can modify a range of various processes such as Material, Mental, Behaviour and Rational processes so as to raise or lower the degree of intensity for the processes. The study also makes some certain contributions to English learning, teaching as well as language study.           &nbsp

Evaluation of Two Rapid Immunochromatographic Assays for Diagnosis of Dengue among Vietnamese Febrile Patients▿

Results from two dengue rapid tests, the PanBio Duo cassette and the SD Bioline strip test, were compared to those of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (Focus Diagnostics) from sera of 200 Vietnamese febrile patients. The PanBio assay was superior, with sensitivity and specificity values for acute-phase serum samples of 54% and 70% (immunoglobulin M) and 70% and 88% (immunoglobulin G), respectively

Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Language Teaching and Learning

This conference proceedings contains articles on the various research ideas of the academic community and practitioners presented at the 4th Conference on Language Teaching and Learning (LTAL-2022). LTAL2022 was organized by the Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry, Vietnam on June 19-20, 2022. Conference Title: 4th Conference on Language Teaching and LearningConference Acronym: LTAL-2022Conference Date: 19-20 June 2022Conference Location: VietnamConference Organizers: Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry, Vietnam