2. Theoretical framework
2.1. An overview of NPs and technical terms
As Newmark (1988a) assumes, technical translation is
primary distinguished from other forms of translation by
terminology. Along with the increasing advancement of
science and technology, there appear new terms to
nominate new things. Terms, to some extent, are single
concepts and sometimes are not enough to describe the
intended content. Therefore, scientists and linguists tend to
combine terms with each other or with other semantic
aspects, like adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc., forming noun
phrases. In technical documents, the frequency of noun
phrases (NPs) is very high, simply because the scientific
and technical documents are characterized by the
description of phenomena, objects and process.
Notably, in the scope of the study, it is worthwhile
bearing in mind that the NPs in this study are technical ones
in electronics texts, which are different from NPs that
denote non-technical concepts.
The meanings of technical terms are closely associated
with a particular subject area and the best way to determine
this for any word is to use a rating scale that categorizes
words according to how closely related they are to a
particular subject area (Baker, 1988; Farrell, 1990;
Sutarsyah, Nation & Kennedy, 1994). This can be done
using a technical dictionary compiled by a subject specialist
or a group of specialists (Nation, 2001; Oh et al., 2000).
Noun phrase is a phrase, which has noun or pronoun as
its head (Morley, 2000). Halliday (1985) explains that
constituents which modify the head noun and appear before
the head noun are called pre-modifiers whereas the
modifiers placed after the head of noun phrase are called
post-modifiers.
Figure 1. Structures of NPs
According to Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik
(1972), noun phrase is the element in the sentence which
typically functions as subject, object or complement. In
scope of this study, the author only focuses on NPs with
premodifiers.
Noun Phrases
Premodifier
Head
Posmodifier
6
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Premodifiers, as discussed by Quirk et al. (1972), are
all the items placed before the head, notably adjectives and
nouns, verbs or determiners. As determiners; however, do
not seem to be a matter of difficulty in technical
documents, they are not under analysis in this study.
From the examples below, we can see that Noun
pre-modifiers in English NPs precede the head noun
whereas in Vietnamese, they are put after the head noun.
The differences in word order between English NPs and
Vietnamese equivalents may be shown in the following
formula:
Table 1. The differences in word order between English NPs
and Vietnamese equivalents
English
Eg.
Noun premodifier + head noun
Data bank
Vietnamese
Eg.
Head noun + Noun modifier
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