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to Minh Ho's "Questions on Thử Ðitìm Cáitươngđương
Trong Phiêndịch"
In reply to Minh
Hồ's questions on
"Thử Ðitìm Cáitươngđương
Trong Phiêndịch"
by
Philip Coen (alias Hoang Ba Cong)
The Terms
and Phrases
The
following paragraphs discuss the terms and phrases
mentioned in Minh Ho’s e-mail:
Terms of Trade
Apart
from what was discussed above, this is in fact economic
jargon which describes “the ratio between money paid for
imports and received from exports” (OED). Thus it is a
“ratio” of monetary values: either tỷ số, tỷ
lệ or tỷ suất sounds like a good bet!
(although one “dictionary” uses chỉ số
which means ‘index’); the term then describes a ratio
of “monetary values”: either giá tiền, trị
giá or giá cả - take your pick…; finally
the term describes that ratio of values of goods
“imported and exported” or “traded”. Depending on
your personal preference this would be xuất nhập
cảng or xuất nhập khẩu or possibly
mậu dịch.
One
dictionary gives tỷ lệ mậu dịch, another chỉ
số giá xuất nhập khẩu. As I am not a
Vietnamese economist, and do now know what the actual term
used in Vietnam by the Hanoi authorities is, I find it
hard to say how the term should be translated. I have
nothing really reliable in the form of Vietnamese
reference material to be able to offer a definitive
solution. However I can say that in China they use the
term: tiến-xuất-khẩu giao-vãn tỷ-suất
and I’d be prepared to wager that the Hanoi term may
well be a ‘Vietnamised’ version of this.
Fiscal Policy
The term
“fiscal policy” raises particular problems, due mainly
to the history and semantics of the word ‘fiscal’. Is
the usage Australian or American? Also, it should be noted
that ‘fiscal’, with a limited range of meaning, is an
adjective having no true noun form, whereas ‘finance’,
with a wider range of meanings, can be a noun, adjective
and verb.
Added to
that, from the reasoning given in the e-mail, Minh appears
to be mistaken about the true responsibilities of the
Australian Department of Treasury and Department of
Finance and Administration (DOFA) and their various
agencies. In the US there is but one Department, namely
Treasury, having responsiblility for Federal fiscal,
finance or financial matters. Also, in the US they use the
term ‘fiscal year’ for ‘financial year’ and their
journalists often just use the term ‘fiscal’ as in fiscal
99 meaning the financial year ending in 1999.
The
older Vietnamese translation of the title of the US
‘Department of Treasury’ was Bộ Tài Chính,
then in the late 1970’s the ‘word-for-word’
translators appeared and changed it to Bộ Ngân Khố.
The original translated the idea and function contained in
the title, the latter translated the title only.
In
Australia, prior to the 1980’s, we hardly ever used the
adjective ‘fiscal’. The word only began to creep into
our lexicon with the rise of ‘economic rationalism’,
when the Harvard MBA’s began to teach us their
capitalist ways. At this time it became fashionable to use
‘fiscal’ rather than the older ‘financial’ or
‘finance’ as the adjective. Bureaucrats, technocrats
and politicians began to use ‘fiscal’ as the adjective
for government financial activities because fiscal
seemed to have official government connotations, while finance/financial
had both public and private sector connotations.
The term
‘fiscal policy’ suffers from the same problems
mentioned in the above example and discussion of ‘terms
of trade’, i.e. without a context no accurate
translation is possible. Because ‘finance policy’ or
‘fiscal policy’, depending on the context, could mean:
government policy relating to ALL aspects of the national
finances - money, taxation, revenue and borrowing, etc…,
as we used to describe it before the MBA’s arrived on
the scene. On the other hand, the term may mean ‘that
policy which governs the national budget’, but then
again the term may have been used in a piece which
discussed taxation matters - who knows?
Notwithstanding
all this, if the adjective ‘national’ was used to
describe this ‘fiscal policy’, perhaps chính sách
tài chính quốc gia would be a safe bet, and, in my
opinion, seems to indicate what the translation of the
term ‘fiscal policy’ most probably would be.
Finally,
whilst on the subject of national Australian fiscal or
financial matters, I think that we should also be careful
about the use of ngân khố to describe a
government ministry, as after all, doesn’t
it just mean quỹ, a place to keep the
silver cash! - And what about the Reserve Bank of
Australia when we consider its functions, is
it Ngân Hàng Trung Ương Úc Ðại Lợi or Ngân
Khố [QuốcGia] Úc Ðại Lợi or Ngân Hàng
Trữ Kim Úc Ðại Lợi or something else?
The Dilemma
To me
the phrase “a $350 000 dilemma” sounds like a bit of
journalistic cant! To more accurately appreciate the
context of the phrase, it would have been nice to see a
little more of the original text, rather than just a
report of it.
I think
the argument that tiến thoái lưỡng nan does
not collocate with the word trị giá is
unconvincing, because ‘$350 000’ does not collocate
with ‘dilemma’ either! That is why I think it is a
piece of journalistic cant. Some journalists seem to think
that they have a duty to coin new terms and phrases or to
“masticate” nouns into verbs. (e.g.: ‘drought’, a
noun, was turned into ‘droughted’, a past participle,
in “…the droughted farmers requested
assistance…”). The point is, if the style or form of a
phrase creates translation problems, rephrase or
paraphrase it so that at least some of the intention and
effect of the original is translated.
Having
considered the e-mail content regarding this phrase, and
if one accepts Minh’s reporting of the facts about it, I
think that while the teacher may have been over-zealous by
trying to translate the phrase at the semantic level, Minh
has also been somewhat over-zealous in criticising the
teacher’s effort.
Because
Minh has been somewhat reticent about giving us more of
the text, it is difficult to see how the ‘$350 000
dilemma’ appears in its context, and thus provide a
reasonable suggestion as to how to overcome the difficulty
posed by the phrase. However, I might suggest that the use
of the simple conjunction vì inserted into
the phrase before trị giá may sort out some of
the problem.
Residence/Residency
I
vaguely remember having seen a similar Centrelink leaflet
or brochure at a community legal centre and being struck
by the odd phraseology which appeared to me to be quite
ambiguous in parts. We could discuss at great length the
failings of information leaflets and brochures and spend
twice as long discussing the translations of them.
However, let me try and make some sense of this conundrum.
When I
first read the sentences as Minh reported them, I was
struck by the oddity of the phrase ‘just to get
residence’. I read the sentences again and noticed that
‘Australia’ seemed to be out of context. My thought
was now similar to that of Minh’s teacher, as Minh
reported it, namely, that there was something in it about
immigration.
I then
read the sentences a third and fourth time and realised
that ‘in Australia’ appears to be redundant and that
the use of ‘residence’ may have been a poor choice of
words by the text’s author. However, I still have a
feeling, that, when composing this part of the text, in
the back of the author’s mind was the idea that some
migrant women endure domestic violence up until such time
as they receive permanent resident status. This idea may
have been the reason for the text’s author using the
strange phraseology ‘in Australia’ and
‘residence’.
Now if
we accept Minh’s arguments then I would suggest that
‘in Australia’ is redundant and if translated at all,
it should be ở đây, while ‘residence’,
meaning ‘a place to stay’ or ‘a place to live’, is
fairly self-explanatory.
However,
this in no way addresses the problem of the strange
phraseology and resultant possible ambiguity. Because Minh
has given us so very little of the original text it is
impossible to decide what course to follow. If there are
other oddities elsewhere in the text, the ambiguity
problem could be resolved because we could treat the
oddities as aberrations in the author’s English
expression. But, if there are no other such textual
oddities, then the ambiguity problem must be addressed by
the translator by creating an equivalent ambiguity in the
translation. It all boils down to: no context, no
translation!
Philip
Coen (alias Hoang Ba Cong)
Professional
Interpreter/Translator
Sydney, September 2002
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