According to the teacher, the most common difficulties that students frequently encountered in Vietnamese-English translation could be sorted into these categories: Grammar, Vocabulary and Spelling. Those findings are similar to the findings from translation tests and student interviews.
First of all, with grammar, it is a system and structure that helps readers better understand each other and derive meaning from the things people say and write. That is why it is really important to take notice of grammatical mistakes, especially when students are in the process of learning English. And those are what the teacher usually says to her students but they rarely paid attention to. The use of verbs, tenses and prepositions were what they always got wrong when taking one of translation tests.
Secondly, another type of difficulty which students faced with was vocabulary. She said that she usually saw vocabulary errors when editing students‟
papers. According to her, the two of the most common mistakes in this category were word choice which is diction in a fancy way of saying and collocation which in the sense of idiosyncratic binary lexical co-occurrences is one of the biggest challenges for any language learner.
And finally, the teacher strongly emphasized students‟ difficulties in using correct spelling. Also, she could not forget those spelling mistakes that “can be good for a laugh sometimes”, which she thought being often just the result of haste.
Those could be avoided easily with the help of a dictionary or a spell checker and some attention. However, the number of spelling errors was only 61/3378.
Besides, there are some errors in translation that the teacher did not mention in the interview. They are errors related to article, word order, passive, cohesion, coherence, style. Those errors occurred frequently in students‟ translation.
4.1.3.2 Question 02: In your opinion, what are causes of these difficulties in Vietnamese-English translation?
The causes of these difficulties in Vietnamese-English translation came with both subjective and objective.
First of all, the first subjective cause was that students did not have a good knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Students faced with difficulties in word choice and collocation. Most of the translation texts were authentic material and related to some specialized fields. Talking about difficulties in word choice, the teacher said that students did not expose themselves to the context; hence they were not familiar with the use of these words in the target language. As a result, their translation was either unnatural or inaccurate. Besides, students commonly encountered difficulties in English collocations because students just translated as what they thought and sometimes they did not have enough words to express or did
not pay enough attention to collocation. Additionally, students had low language proficiency in Vietnamese as well as English (limited vocabulary and not good grammar), not enough knowledge of Vietnamese culture. Also, students applied an inappropriate method of translation (word-to-word translation). The next causes needed to be mentioned were misunderstanding, unmindfulness, the emphasis on the form of the source text instead of the target text an overgeneralization (without the concern for exception). To illustrate this point, she gave an example of the use of the regular past tense verb ending “-ed” of forms like “I walked” to produce forms like “I goed” or “I rided”.
Also, possible objective causes were given. Firstly, there were the differences between English and Vietnamese for example the lack of S-V agreement, tense, plural and singular nouns, etc. When students encountered a complex subject such as a long relative clause, they may confuse in the translation process and sometimes made mistakes. Especially, she strongly emphasized that there was the influence of the mother tongue. For instance, the use of passive voice in English and Vietnam was different in some situations. Therefore, when translating, they may not take into account the different between the two languages and may assume the use of passive voice for “bị” or “được” for the Vietnamese expressions. Moreover, source language text included cultural content such as differences between Vietnamese, Asian culture and Western culture. Also, inappropriate teaching documents and methods may lead to those difficulties. She said that they did not have time to run interesting actives in class because of the large class size. Finally, students did not have enough time to double-check their papers before submitting.
Generally speaking, this result was quite consistent with findings of translation tests and student interviews. However, text type, which leads students to real problems in translation, was not mentioned. An explanation is that she just focused on one text type in her class.
4.1.3.3 Question 03: What recommendations can you give to help improve translation teaching and learning at Dong Nai Technology University?
From her point of view, the students need to have enough linguistic and general background knowledge before they study this subject. Secondly, they need to be exposed more to the source texts by reading and do some searching before they really translate. Then, they need to prepare carefully before translating, for example, looking up the dictionaries and searching tools for the equivalents (if any), and reading the related material for better understanding of the content and language use.