Some Non-Linguistic Obstacles in English-Vietnamese Translation

This paper addresses some non-linguistic hindrances in English-Vietnamese translation, which are
ethical and ideologic obstacles, barriers in censorship and cultural hinderances, to raise the awareness
about potential difficulties in translation and illustrate some ways to overcome these challenges made
by some translators. The findings of the study shows that influences from morality, ideology and
cultural values may hinder translators from rendering English text into Vietnamese and it is necessary
for translators to be highly aware of these non-linguistic obstacles to make good translations which
would not cause confusion or misunderstanding, or be criticized by readers or social activists.
Additionally, the paper also proves that an English sentence may have different Vietnamese
translations because text-based equivalence is not only determined by linguistic factors but also by
people, acting and interacting in a social context, and euphemistic expressions can be used when
there is a conflict between translator’s and author’s ideology or when it is censored but such
expressions should not cause confusion or misunderstanding. In-depth cultural knowledge of the
source language and the target language is also requiried for the reason that it could be a helpful tool
for translators in reserving integrity of the source language and naturalness of the target language