A study on the equivalence between English and Vietnamese translation of insurance terms in US health insurance

DECLARATION This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or tertiary institution, and to the best of my knowledge and belief, neither does it contain material previously published or written by another person, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text. Signature Vũ Thị Thanh Yến ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS On the completion of this thesis, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lê Hùng Tiến who gave me benefit of his wisdom and his expert knowledge in translation as well as his constant encouragement from the beginning stage of working out the research proposal to the final stage of writing up the thesis. Without his critical comments and valuable suggestions, this study could not have been completed. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mrs. Rosemary Nguyen who helped shape the idea for my thesis, giving me her practical guidance, assisting me with data collection and sharing with me her long and varied experience in the translation of health insurance terms in the US health plans. I take this opportunity to express my sincere thank to all lecturers in Postgraduate Department at College of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for their useful lectures during my M.A course. Finally, I would also like to thank my parents who have been a constant source of encouragement, support, love and care during the course of my writing. ABSTRACT The need for the translation of US health plans into Vietnamese is a matter-of-fact since there are already a number of American insurer carriers operating in Vietnam, and many more are expected to enter such a potential market of more than 80 million people. However, it is not an easy task at all due to sharp differences in the sub-culture of health insurance between the US and Vietnam. This thesis titled “A study on the equivalence between English and Vietnamese translation of insurance terms in US health insurance”, therefore, is an attempt to find out the differences and similarities between English HI terms and their Vietnamese equivalents, and to draw out the strategies/procedures/methods that are appropriate to the translation of HI terms in the US health plans into Vietnamese. Hopefully, the research may make a contribution to the translation of HI terms and will be of some help to insurance circle, especially translators with little experience of doing the translation in the field. To this end, the paper identifies the equivalence relationships and classifies terms according to their structural patterns. More importantly, the research paper focuses on working out strategies/procedures/methods that can be best applied to the translation of terms of equivalence and non-equivalence groups. Suggestions for translation strategies/procedures/methods are also made so that translators may have an idea of what strategies/procedures/methods can be used to deal with certain groups of terms. ABBREVIATIONS 1. BH: Bảo hiểm 2. BHYT: Bảo hiểm y tế 3. BHSK: Bảo hiểm sức khoẻ 4. HI: Health insurance 5. SL: Source language 6. TL: Target language TABLE OF CONTENTS PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 1. Rationale 1 2. Scope of the study 2 3. Aims of the study 2 4. Methods of the study 2 5. Design of the study 3 PART B: DEVELOPMENT 4 CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 4 I. 1.Terminology 4 I.1.1. Definition 4 I.1.2. General features of terminology 4 I.1.3. Term creation 6 I.2. English single words and compounds in comparison with the Vietnamese ones 7 I.3. Translation theory 7 I.3.1. Definition of translation 7 I.3.2. Translation equivalence 8 I.3.3. Translation methods, strategies and procedures 10 I.3.4. Technical translation 11 I.4. Translation of terminology 11 I.5. Chapter conclusion 13 CHAPTER II: THE TRANSLATION OF HEALTH INSURANCE TERMS OF EQUIVALENCE GROUP 14 II.1. An overview of equivalence relationships in the translation of health insurance terms 14 II.2. Classification of health insurance terms in the US health insurance plans according to their structural patterns 17 II.2.1. Single terms 17 II.2.2. Compound terms 19 II.3. The common strategies and procedures used in the translation of health insurance terms of non-equivalence group 19 II.3.1. The translation of single terms – Old words with new senses 23 II.3.2. The translation of compound terms by rank shift or transposition 24 II.3.3. The translation strategy which involves the deletion of “OF” 26 II.4. Concluding remark 26 CHAPTER III: THE TRANSLATION OF HEALTH INSURANCE TERMS OF NON-EQUIVALENCE GROUP 28 III.1. The source of non-equivalence problem in the translation of health insurance terms in the US health plans 28 III.2. The strategies, procedures and methods used in dealing with non-equivalence problem in the translation of health insurance terms in the US health plans 29 III.2.1. The translation of terms by transference procedure (the use of loan words) 30 III.2.2. The translation of terms by paraphrase 32 III.2.3. The translation of terms with communicative method 34 III.2.4. Literal translation 37 III.3. Concluding remarks 38 PART C: CONCLUSION 39 The terms of equivalence group 39 2. The terms of non-equivalence group 39 3. Suggestion for the methods, procedures and strategies 40 4. Suggestion for further studies 42 REFERENCES APPENDICES PART A: INTRODUCTION Rationale Since Viet Nam has successfully gained its accession to WTO, and the Bush administration has granted Vietnam with Permanent Normal Trading Status (PNTR), a wide range of actors, including US enterprises, is expected to be here. It is also envisaged that US HI providers will do business in our country, hence a demand for the translation work in the field will be inevitable. The problem lies in the fact that sharp differences in the US HI and the Vietnamese one result in several diffrent HI plans between the two countries. Undoubtedly, this will pose a great obstacle to translators due to their insufficient knowledge about the two different sub-cultures of health insurance. They may have to squeeze their brain to convey the true essence of each kind of health plans from English in Vietnamese. In the USA, quite a few Vietnamese-American are full time employees in American companies and factories, hence eligible to HI coverage offered by their employers. Annually, the companies and factories have the so-called enrollment for their employees to enroll for health benefits or to choose the health plan that best benefits them. To guarantee that their employees do not end up in wrong decisions, which goes in counter with their benefits due to the failure to understand HI plans written in English, they have them translated by Vietnamese and native American translators. In Vietnam, though translators do not have to translate such HI plans for clients, they still have to translate a number of presumably popular HI terms, including many in the US HI plans for at least insurance-majored students or for training courses held by some insurance carriers. Having studied and compared the original and the translated versions by different translators, I have come up with an idea of making an investigation into how HI terms in the US HI plans are currently dealt with. Hopefully, the study, titled “A study on the equivalence between English and Vietnamese translation of insurance terms in US HI plans”, may be of some use to those who have been and will do translation in the field. 2. Scope of the study Within limited time, resources, conditions, and the length of the thesis, the researcher focuses only on HI terms collected from HI plans. Disability income insurance which is also a sub-type of the US HI is excluded from the study. Such is the boundary set for my thesis so as to achieve a thorough investigation. Specifically, the study takes into consideration such major aspects as follows: classification of equivalence relationships structural patterns of HI terms in English their translations 3. Aims of the study To work out the similarities and differences between English terms and their Vietnamese equivalents To draw out the strategies/procedures/methods that may apply to the translation of HI terms, especially to the translation of non-equivalence terms in the US HI plans into Vietnamese 4. Methods of the study 4.1. Research questions a. What are the similarities and differences between English terms and their Vietnamese equivalents? b. What are strategies/procedures/methods that are appropriate to the translation of HI terms in the US insurance plans? 4.2. Research methods On the completion of the thesis, the researcher went through the following steps: Building up a theoretical background by reviewing translation and terminology Collecting and grouping English insurance terms in the US insurance plans and their Vietnamese equivalents for description, analysis and induction Drawing out strategies, procedures and methods in the translation of HI terms The main method is contrastive analysis. 4.3. Data collection The English HIterms studied are taken from the US insurance health plans and their equivalents are picked out from the translations by native American and Vietnamese-American translators living in the US and those in charge of translation work in Bảo Việt, Pjico, Prudential, and Aoncare which are big insurer carriers in Vietnam. 5. Design of the study The study consists of three main parts, references and appendices as follows: Part A: Introduction The rationale for the study, scope, aims, methods and design of the study are orderly presented in this part. Part B: Development There are three chapters in this part: Chapter I: Theoretical background The theory of translation and terminology will be dealt with in this chapter. Chapter II: The translation of HI terms of equivalence group This chapter features an investigation into the equivalence between English and Vietnamese translation of HI terms in the US health plans. Accordingly, how HI terms in the US health plans are currently translated and what strategies/procedures/methods are employed are the focus of the research. Chapter III: The translation of HI terms of non-equivalence group This chapter examines how non-equivalence problem in the translation of HI terms in the US health plans is solved by available translation strategies, procedures and methods. Part C: Conclusion The conclusion summaries the strategies, procedures and methods of translation as well as makes relevant suggestions. The appendixes give more examples of different groups of HI terms. PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND I. 1.Terminology I.1.1. Definition Terminology has been defined variously by many different linguists, either native or Vietnamese. Chau, D.H (1981) claims “Terms are specialists words used within a specific field, a profession or any technological field”. To identify technical term, he states “Scientific and technical terminology consists of lexical units used to denote phenomenal objects, activities …in industrial technologies and natural or social sciences”. Sharing some common features in content with the one by Chau, though put differently, the definition proposed by Giap, N.T (1998) seems to be more informative: “Terminology, understood as a special linguistic unit of language, consists of word and fixed phrase that provides precise definition and objectives that belong to particular scientific area.” Such definitions can serve as a foundation on which we can base our distinction between terms and words. In fact, Baker (1998:261) puts that “Terms differ from words in that they are endowed with a special forms of reference, namely that they refer to discrete conceptual entities, properties, activities or relations which constitute the knowledge space of a particular subject field”. Accordingly, further important differences between terms and words are as follows: 1. Terms have special reference within a particular discipline whereas words function in general reference over a variety of subject fields. 2. Terms keep their lives and meanings only for as long as they serve the system of knowledge they gave rise to them. In other words, terms together with words and proper names constitute the general class of lexical items. Names refer individually to objects and people; words refer arbitrary boundary between terms and words is not a clear-cut, i.e. many terms become ordinary words when they are used in specialized field. I.1.2. General features of terminology Since terminology is not allowed to carry the speaker’ attitude, figurative sense, compliment or criticism, it should possess the following qualities: accurateness, systematicism, internationalism, popularity and nationality as claimed by Giap, N.T (1998) and Lang, L.V (1977). They will be briefly presented in the next part. I.1.2.1. Accurateness A term needs to be accurate and clear because basically it reflects an exact concept of a science. If a term is of absolute accuracy, people never mistake one concept for another. Once a word has become a term, it no longer has connotational, emotional meaning; it also loses its polysemousness, synonymousness and antonymousness. In short, terminology necessarily works on the principle that “one concept has only one term for it, and one term indicates only one concept”. This relationship is called the one-to-one equivalent between a concept and a term. I.1.2.2. Systematicism Any field of sciences has its own limited system of concepts, which are named by a system of terms. Therefore, each item has its own position in the system of concepts and belongs to a terminological system. As a result, a term loses its value when isolated from system. In short, a term has to be a dependent member of its system. I.1.2.3. Internationalism Terms are used internationally because they are special words expressing common scientific concepts to people of different languages. Therefore, it is useful to agree on terms to be used among languages in order to push up the development of science. The international links in science result in a number of terms presented in many different languages. For example, video, radio, telephone…are found in French, German, English and Vietnamese…with little difference in form. I.1.2.4. Popularity Terms need to be popular in the sense that they should be close to the language of the masses, which is to say easy-to-remember, easy-to-understand and easy-to-remember, since they will help bring knowledge to and benefit men of all walks of life. I.1.2.5. Nationality Though belonging to a particular subject field, terms are still a part of a language system of a nation. They, therefore, possess all the characteristics and colors of a nation language. Put differently, they should be made from the materials of the national language in terms of lexicology, forms and grammar. I.1.3. Term creation Since terms are to name concepts, so whenever a concept appears, is made in a culture, or translated to a new culture, it involves the creation of a new term to name it. I.1.3.1 .Primary and secondary term creation Primary and secondary terms formation are governed by different influences: Primary term formation occurs when a newly created concept has to be named wile secondary term formation occurs as a result of either (1) the monolingual revision of given terminology, for example, the purpose of producing a standard document, or (2) a transfer of technology to an other linguistic community-a process which requires the creation of new term in the target language. Anther fundamental differences between the two formation methods lies in the fact that in primary term formation, there is no linguistic precedent although there are rules for forming appropriate terms. On the contrary, in secondary term formation, there is always the precedent of an already existing term in another language with its own motivation. Secondary term formation is more often subject to guidelines than primary term formation which are on the basis of patterns terms and words formation already prevalent in the subject field and natural language in question. (Baker, M: 1998) I.1.3.2 .Guidance on the creation of terms Terms should consistently reflect some key features of the concepts they are liked to in order to facilitate precise reference. At the same time, they should be as economical as possible without giving rise to homonymy. Terms should be lexically systematic and should conform to the phonological and morphological rules of the language. Terms must conform to the general rules of word-formation of the language or they should allow composition and derivation where appropriate. The meaning of the term should be recognizable independently of any specific context. Those are advices from International Organization for Standard (ISO 1995) (cited in Bac, N.T, 2003) I.2.English single words and compounds in comparison with the Vietnamese ones Single and compound words in Vietnamese have been defined by many established linguists. Châu, Đ.H (1981:40) defines single words as one-morpheme words. He also claims that the majority of Vietnamized single words are monosyllabic. The number of polysyllabic simple words such as bù nhìn (scarecrow), ếch ương (frog), mồ hôi (sweat) is relatively small. According to Cẩn, N.T. (1999: 51), a Vietnamese syllable, in most cases, corresponds to a word, whereas compounds are comprised of at least two words that normally can exist independently and seperately from each other. Nguyen Hiet Chi and Le Thuoc (1935) defined that ‘Compound words are words with at least two roots; namely, words in their structures, have at least two morphemes which are not affixationals but root morphemes’. Unlike a Vietnamese single word that is formed by only one morpheme in most normal cases, a single word in English contains at east one morpheme. In fact, a single word in English is defined as a sound or a combination of sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes. (TheFreeDictionary at: www.thefreedictionary.com/ - 74k - Jul 13, 2007). For example, the single word ‘need’ has only one morpheme, but ‘inconceivable’ written as a single word has three morphemes: in, meaning ‘not’, conceive meaning ‘think or imagine’, and able meaning ‘able to be, fit to be’. One important feature of morpheme is that some just have grammatical functions such as making plurality (limitations), and tense (insured). Compound words in English share certain common features with the Vietnamese ones. Take now a definition of compounds as illustration. Jackson and Amvela (2000:70) stated that compounds may be defined as stems consisting of more than one roots. (cited in Hien, T.T.T, 2005). I.3. Translation theory I.3.1. Definition of translation Kelly, L.G-a prominent figure in linguistic circle stated “Without translation, there is no history of the world”. How can it that be? What has he based on to make such a claim? And what is translation that is of great importance as implied by Kelly? In an attempt to find the answer to the last question, I have find myself thrown into confusion by quite a few definitions proposed by different linguists. Follows are some of them: According to Cartford (1965), translation is “the replacement of a text in one language (SL) by an equivalent text in another language (TL)”. In Bell, R.T (1991:5), the author collected and edited the following definition: “Translation is the expression in another language (or TL) of what has been expressed in another, SL, preserving semantic and stylistic equivalences.” Hatim & Mason (1990:3), however, focus more on the communicative purpose of translation rath