AN ANALYSIS OF THE VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENCE OF NEGATION IN ‘THE CALL OF THE WILD’ TRANSLATION

Abstract

Negation is an important matter in English which involves many forms of elements and particles. It is commonly mistaken for negative verbs, but, in fact, negative verbs are only a part of English negation. Negative affixes, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and the negative no, and not are all elements of negation. Starting from the confusion between negation and negative verbs, it is frequently believed that negation in English is regularly translated into Vietnamese as không. However, in different types of texts and specific contexts, especially in literary one, equivalents of negation are quite diverse and distinctive. This study aims to analyze the Vietnamese equivalent diversity of negative items categorized under patterns detached from the classic literary work – ‘The Call of the Wild’ by Jack (1903) and the translation ‘Tiếng gọi của Hoang dã’ by Lâm and Võ (2019). Based on the text analysis method and conducting a process of splitting, filtering, and inspecting source and target texts, không and its variants are identified as the most common equivalent patterns; some brief and thorough descriptions for variants are specified. Particularly, uncommon equivalents which are concerning addition, omission, positive transformations and other structural, lexical transformations have been investigated for conceivably affecting factors of equivalent selections by translators. The obtained results are a modest part contributing to the vast work of building an English-Vietnamese corpus. The matter plausibly seems to be only concerning translation issues, yet the study has indicated the significance of text analysis for consuming meanings in source language and expressing in target language – both require sufficient understanding of the two languages.