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INTRODUCTION

An increasing number of universities in Vietnam have added courses in translation to their curricula; however, the textbooks available for such courses are few. This unit has been written with these courses in mind. The unit is designed to provide the learners with some basic principles of translation which will be generally useful to translation courses in universities and colleges, to help the learners avoid some errors they may encounter when they translate a text, to provide the learners with essential English sentence patterns that could be very useful for the learners in learning and practicing translating and to provide the learners 20 assignments related to the theory they have learned.

The desire of the author is to make available the principles of translation which have learned through personal experience in translation and teaching translation, and through interaction with colleagues involved in translation projects in many universities in Central Vietnam. Since it is assumed that the students will be speakers of Vietnamese language, many of these exercises involve translating from or into their mother tongue. The material is presented in a way that it can be used in a self-teaching situation or in a classroom. An attempt has been made to keep technical terms to a minimum. When technical vocabulary is used, every effort is made to clarify the meaning of such vocabulary or to provide its meaning in Vietnamese. This has been done so that the unit can be used by any student translator, even though his exposure to linguistic and translation theory has been minimal.

This is an introductory unit. The lessons give an overview presenting the fundamental principles of translation and the rest of the unit illustrates these principles. The overriding principle is that translation is meaning-based rather than form-based. Once the learner has identified the meaning of the source text, his goal is to express that same meaning in the receptor/target language. Many examples of cross-language equivalence are used to illustrate this principle.

Since the coursebook has been written for the students to learn either by themselves in their distant learning course or in class with a teacher, there will be a coursebook and 20 assignments.

By the end of the course, the students will be able to:

1.      Obtain general knowledge of the  principles of translation .

2.      Get familiar with and effectively use the English sentence patterns in their translations.

On the completion of this coursebook, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Ton Nu Nhu Huong for her encouragement. I would also like to be grateful to Dr. Tran Van Phuoc and other colleagues of the College of Foreign Languages and the English Department for their kind help.

Errors are unavoidable in this coursebook. Therefore, I appreciate and welcome any criticism on the course book.