Investigating teachers’ and graduates’ remarks on the translation of English modals into Vietnamese provided by Google Translate
Due to demands of using English for work, study and entertainment, more Vietnamese people have tended to use Google Translate to help translate English into Vietnamese and vice versa. This tool has become popular in these situations. However, can this tool translate English modal verbs expressing...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2021
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18528/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/18528/1/49885-172415-2-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Due to demands of using English for work, study and entertainment, more Vietnamese people
have tended to use Google Translate to help translate English into Vietnamese and vice versa.
This tool has become popular in these situations. However, can this tool translate English
modal verbs expressing social functions into Vietnamese? To obtain the data for the study, the
authors used the English source extracted from the grammar course book by Celce-Murcia and
Larsen-Freeman (1999) which was fed into Google Translate for their Vietnamese versions.
The source was related to making requests, giving advice, expressing potential realization,
expressing desire, giving invitation and making preference. The study also recruited 11
experienced Vietnamese-speaking teachers of English and 21 Vietnamese-speaking graduates
of English to give their remark on these translation texts which were sent to them via email and
the social media platform Zalo. The findings showed that Google Translate was able to keep
the intended meanings of many social functions through using the English modal verbs when
transferring these functional texts into Vietnamese. The results also uncovered that most of the
teachers and graduates agreed with these translated texts provided by Google Translate.
Besides, both groups had a quite common point of view that Google Translate were unable to
translate the past forms of the English modal verbs for more indirect or polite intention when
they were transferred into Vietnamese. Some recommendations to help improve English-
Vietnamese translation provided by Google Translate were also included. |
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