Translation of Vietnamese Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) and/or Multi-verb Constructions into English

Abstract

Like many languages in West Africa, Southeast Asia, amongst others, serial verb constructions (SVCs) are popular in Vietnamese in which several verbs appear together as a single predicate indicating multiple interconnected and/or sequential subevents in a complex event. To express such a complex event, non-serializing languages like English may require multiple clauses and/or sentences. Therefore, attempts to render Vietnamese SVCs as a single English predicate in translation works may not always be successful. This paper aims at addressing such difficulties by analyzing a number of multi-verb constructions, including SVCs, in Vietnamese from a semantico-syntactic perspective before discussing possible English translation options with illustrative examples of translation errors collected from the assignments of graduate students at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi (ULIS-VNU). The paper concludes with a suggested translation process for effectively dealing with Vietnamese SVCs and multi-verb constructions.

Keywords: SVC, multi-verb constructions, Vietnamese, English, translation.