Translating Culture-specific Items in Vietnamese Cultural Festival Texts into English

Abstract

In recent years, tours of cultural festivals in Viet Nam have been on the rise thanks to the increasing demands from foreign visitors, which requires high-quality English versions of cultural festival texts for tour guidance and tourism promotion, contributing to a positive image for Viet Nam. However, such texts are burdened with a large number of culture-specific items that are not easily translated from Vietnamese into English. This paper aims at exploring culture-specific terms in cultural festival texts, identifying their categories, and then applying appropriate techniques to translate them from Vietnamese into English. Using the SLD MultiTerm software, the researchers collected the data from 300 texts about the 100 most popular festivals organized throughout Viet Nam all year round. The research results are a list of Vietnamese-English culture-specific terms with interpretations of their meanings and translations, and they all serve as a useful resource for tourism, culture, and translation courses at universities in Viet Nam.