Learners’ Difficulties in Self-evaluation in English Vietnamese Translation Quality Assessment

Abstract

The field of English translation and interpretation has shown an increasing popularity in Vietnam in the context of globalization. However, translation in the target culture still has a certain number of problems in transferring the equivalence between two languages, which causes some ambiguities and misunderstandings for readers (House, 2015). Hence, translation quality assurance is significant in ensuring the degree of suitability of the texts as a post-translation process (Munday, 2016). This paper aimed to investigate the difficulties of English majors of translation and interpretation in assessing the quality of texts translated from English to Vietnamese during the learning process on an independent basis. The study employed the mixed method with 50 fourth-year students at Nguyen Tat Thanh University via questionnaires. The findings revealed that those majors had to deal with five main groups of troubles including (1) time constraints, (2) non-equivalence between English and Vietnamese, (3) insufficient cultural understandings, (4) inadequate supports from lecturers, and especially (5) the lack of official framework for translation quality assessment. This paper also proposes the fundamental for university curriculum developments from the learners’ perspectives.