An Analysis of Negative Verbs’ Equivalents in a Vietnamese Translation of ‘The Call of the Wild’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54855/ijte.22217Keywords:
equivalent, negation, negative verbs, English-Vietnamese translationAbstract
Negative verbs in English are regularly translated into Vietnamese as không (Doan, 2010). However, in different types of texts and specific contexts, especially in literary ones, the equivalents of negative verbs are quite diverse and distinctive. This study aims to analyze the Vietnamese equivalent diversity of negative verbs detached from the classic literary work – 'The Call of the Wild' by Jack London (1903) (ST) and the translation ‘Tiếng gọi của Hoang dã’ by Lam Hoai and Vo Quang (2019) (TT). Based on qualitative and text analysis method, after conducting a process of splitting, filtering, and inspecting source and target texts, 164 negative verbs were detached from the ST and their matching equivalents in the TT; không and its variants were identified as the dominant equivalent pattern (72.6%). Particularly, some specific equivalents, which were the results of passive-active restructuring (1.8%), negative-positive replacement (6.7%), and other structural, lexical transformations (12.8%), have been investigated for conceivably affecting features of equivalent selections by translators. The obtained results would be a modest part contributing to the vast work of building an English-Vietnamese corpus. The matter plausibly concerns translation issues, yet the outcomes of this study could be applied to translation training and teaching reading comprehension.
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