ASSESSING THE TRANSLATION OF PERSON REFERENCE FORMS IN A LITERARY TEXT: A CASE OF HARRY POTTER’S JOURNEY FROM ENGLISH TO VIETNAMESE

Abstract

The study aims to assess the Vietnamese translation of English person reference forms, particularly “I - you” dyads in a literary text. To fulfill the purpose, House’s functional-pragmatic model (House, 2015), extended with Attitudinal resources of Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), is adopted as the analytical framework for assessment. The data include 75 “I - you” dyads collected from “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (2014) and its Vietnamese translation “Harry Potter và Hòn đá phù thuỷ” (2016). The research findings show the translator’s attempt in selecting equivalents among the remarkably diverse system of person reference in Vietnamese to produce a functionally adequate translation in accordance with situational and cultural contexts of the target language. Grounded on research findings, target language-oriented strategy for English-Vietnamese translation of “I - you” dyads is proposed. Furthermore, the study has proved effective in extending House’s model (2015) with Attitudinal resources of Appraisal theory in order to explore the attitudes of the source text writer embedded in the original, serving the benefits of translation assessment in practice.