Written for Gideon Schipper
“Why are there so many foreign words in your Vietnamese conversations?”
It reminds me to trace back to hundred years ago, when the French brought the bicycle to Vietnam. It was the first time ever Anamneses witness a new concept: b-i-c-y-c-l-e. We never had known what it was so the French words were taken to name these objects: pê-đan (pedal), ghi-đông… Yes, we have the corresponding Vietnamese words for these objects, but the Vietnamese versions are seldom used.
Hundred years later, this habit still occurs. One specific case: reminder. The Vietnamese word is nhắc. I always ask my mom “Mẹ nhớ nhắc con dạy em học” (Mom, please remind me to tute sis). What in my mind was the action of one person reminds another person. I never knew that the machine can do the reminding action. The first time I interacted with the Remind function done by a machine was in 2006 with MS Outlook, when Phuong asked me to set a personal reminder. It was the first time I encounter the concept of “a machine reminds a person”, and the context was totally in English. The word “reminder” was written into my mind and I never bothered remembering the Vietnamese word “nhắc”. The next times, I always use “reminder” in my conversations.
It happens for many terminologies like Software Design, Architecture etc.
Now, let’s take another example. When I talk to a Designer, I say “Anh DBA chưa vô” (The DBA hasn’t come yet). The corresponding phrase for DBA in Vietnamese is “người quản lý hệ thống cơ sở dữ liệu”. But if I speak “Anh quản lý hệ thống cơ sở dữ liệu chưa vô”, it’ll take the other speaker a few seconds to try to translate the word back to English to be able to understand.
It’s a habit of using the original terminologies as standard without translating to Vietnamese.
And yes, I admit it’s a bad habit. It spoils the transparency of Vietnamese – our mother tongue.
Solution? Either I’ll try to translate each word into Vietnamese and it’ll waste the time of all parties in a conversation or I’ll speak English entirely.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, language is a tool for communication. When the message is properly delivered, the purpose of communication is fulfilled. It’s a trade-off, we accept the usage of foreign words in our daily conversation to save time of translation and translation standardization.
Does it create a bad image of us Vietnamese?
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Tags of this article: language,living,solution,standard,study,translation,trend,vietnam.
Last update February 11, 2007
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February 11th, 2007 at 8:29 am
I think that we have a lot of words from foreigner. The above example is one, another is Hán-Việt (Han-Viet). Have you ever used “long” (dragon) in your communicate ?
I don’t mean that your idea is bad. I don’t like the men who is do that (I’m too
). But sometime, I need to do that because I want to impressive someone, or I want to be a connoisseur in front of the girls 
.
February 14th, 2007 at 6:29 am
Hello Tai,
Of course you are right (as usual
. Language is for communication and if we understand eachother the main purpose of communication is realized. On the other hand, a language is also part of culture and history of a country, used for thousands and thousands of years, and that is why I appreciate it very much when people have their own words for new things. I know that during those thousands of years there have been developments in the language too, but changes seem to come faster and faster nowadays. If this continues, would we get the same culture all over the world? (as is the case with Coca Cola, but that’s another discussion). Does it create a bad image of the Vietnamese? NO! In fact, I think you don’t use too many strange words. My own language (Dutch) has far more strange words (especially English and French) and I hope we Dutch are still not too bad… 
The Belgiums, our neighbours, have a language that is very similar to ours and they usually manage to create their own new words for new things. So, don’t worry, I just noticed that in a Vietnamese conversation, that I still cannot fully understand, suddenly there were some familiar words! Sounded funny, I must say. Ok, that’s my reply. wish you a very good new year, hope we can work well together and have a good time too! Bye,
Gideon