This sentence above extracted from a Vietnamese student’s translating Vietnamese sentence into English. Why did this student make errors? In dealing with learners’ errors, Lado states “since the learner tends to transfer the habits of his native language structure to the foreign language, we have here the major source of difficulty or ease in learning the structure of a foreign language. Those structures that are similar will be easy to learn because they will be transferred and may function satisfactorily in the foreign language. Those structures that are different will be difficult because when transferred they will not function satisfactorily in the foreign language and will therefore have to be changed.”
Vietnamese students usually make errors when translating Vietnamese sentence into English because there are some differences between Vietnamese and English grammar. This paper will focus on these differences and classify some error types that students often meet.
In the first part of this paper, we will discuss types of the basic sentence patterns in English and Vietnamese and make comparison between English and Vietnamese to find out whether Vietnamese has the same basic sentence patterns or not.
The second part focuses on some errors types that students often meet and how to conduct teaching translating Vietnamese sentence into English.
Before we explore the basic sentence patterns in English and Vietnamese, it is important to understand definition of the sentence, element of the sentence and their functions. Traditional grammar defines that a sentence is ‘a group of words expressing a complete thought’ or ‘a group of words that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period’. Vietnamese and English sentence have two main elements: subject and predicate. Lynnm Berk defines that “the grammatical subject of the sentence is often the conversational subject, i.e, the person or thing that the sentence is about. The predicate often makes a comment about that subject, i.e, it ‘predicate’ “. We often see that in a simple sentence, a subject is a single structure, while a predicate can have internal structure.
