An investigation of the translation of book titles from English to Vietnamese by using Newmark's translation theory.

Abstract

The title of the book plays an extremely significant role in the whole book. The title contributes to the success of a book. A good title will attract readers at first sight. If you want readers to go to the general content of a book, first of all, the title must be good and attractive to catch their attention. Based on the theory of Newmark (1988), the author conducts a comparative study and contrasts the titles of books in English and their versions in Vietnamese. The aim of this study was to find out how book titles if chosen at random, would translate into what form the topic would be. Whether these translations have retained their meaning or have been altered to fit the national culture. In addition, it analyzes what methods and techniques were used to translate book titles and demonstrates how these methods have an impact on selected book titles. To do this, I randomly selected 200 book titles on a variety of topics to get the most objective evaluation. According to the results, up to 120 titles retained the meaning of the original through two methods of literal translation and semantic translation. The remaining 80 titles were analyzed as having no archive of the original meaning through three methods of communicative translation, free translation, and adaptation. At the same time, this study also shows that literal translation and adaptation are two methods used by many translators to translate books from English to Vietnamese.