A study on pragmatic equivalence in the English
Vietnamese translation of the story "Confession
of an economic hit man" by John Perkins
Vũ Thị Thanh Hoa Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ
Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: Assoc.Prof.Dr. Lê Hùng Tiến
Năm bảo vệ: 2009 Abstract. This study examines how Vietnamese readers responded to the translation of
pragmatic markers in the TT, through which pragmatic equivalence was somehow taken into
consideration. To fulfill these goals, the study first makes clear the notion of pragmatics and
identifies pragmatic markers along with their specific types. Also, it conducts a review on such
relating translation theories as equivalence in translation, pragmatic equivalence and E. A.
Nida‟s response-based approach on Translation Quality Assessment. Then comes the
explorations of the source and target language texts in the aspect of functions of pragmatic
markers.
Keywords. Tương đương ngữ dụng; Ngữ dụng học; Dịch

Content
Much ink has flown on discussing the term equivalence in translation. It is the relationship
between a source text (ST) and a target text (TT) that allows the TT to be considered as a
translation of the ST. It signifies any relation characterizing translation under a specified set of
circumstances. Equivalence was a relationship between two texts in two languages, rather than
between the languages themselves. It can be said that success of a translation is determined not

pairs. The ground for the investigation in this study is the notion of dynamic equivalence
proposed by Nida & Taber (1969), Koller (1989), Baker (1992), Newmark (1981), Hatim and
Mason (1990) and Monia Bayar (2007) and the conception of pragmatics and pragmatic markers
suggested by Levinson (1983), Richards J.C, Platt J & Platt H (1992) and Fraser (1999)
4. Methodology
4.1. Research Questions
- What are pragmatic features of the source text and the receptors‟response to the translation
text?
- What are functions of pragmatic markers demonstrated in John Perkins‟s original work? Are
these markers treated equivalently in the translation text?
- To what extent are the original text and the translation pragmatically equivalent?
4.2. Methods
On the one hand, this study will be conducted under the corpus-based analysis. The aim of this
method is to attempt to outline the existing territory occupied by a new field of research in
translation studies. The research techniques are gathering quantitative data via a survey
questionnaire and presenting the results through statistics and tables. On the other hand, the
qualitative method will be resorted to as a supplementary one and not officially employed. It will
help understand the meaning of the numbers produced by quantitative methods. Using
quantitative methods, it is possible to give precise and testable expression to qualitative ideas.
This combination of quantitative and qualitative data gathering is often referred to as mixed-
methods research.
4.3. Data collection procedures
To investigate the pragmatic equivalence between the original text “Confessions of an Economic
Hit Man” and its Vietnamese translation, the following steps will be taken to collect data for the
study:
- doing document analyses to build up a strong theoretical framework for the study
- conducting a survey according to DCT method to identify and collect all pragmatic
markers explicit in the SL and TL texts.
In the DCT the discourse is structured so that part of it is left open and part closed. A
space is provided for subjects to supply speech act under investigation, but the response is

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