An Investigation of Vietnamese Classifiers in English – Vietnamese Translation

Abstract

The research was conducted to investigate the use of the three most common classifiers cái, con, người, and figure out the patterns of how to use them when English noun phrases are translated into Vietnamese. To do this, a corpus has been built from the two bestselling literary works The Great Gatsby and Tuesday with Morrie in the English version accompanied by the Vietnamese translated version. The data collected were analyzed in terms of counting numbers of occurrences, calculating percentages and frequency to conclude what classifier among the three is the most frequently used. The findings of this research can be summarized as follow: first, cái is a classifier for inanimate objects, whereas con and người are used with animate ones; however, there is one exception that emerges during the research, which is the classifier con followed by inanimate nouns. Second, from a typical structure of CL + N, formulae are given for the translation of each classifier in specific cases. Finally, double and triple classifiers are chronologically formed by these three classifiers with suggested formulae for Vietnamese translation. The findings aim to support Vietnamese learners using classifiers correctly when translating English noun phrases into Vietnamese noun phrases.