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Scoping out emerging communities of practice of translation in development work in Vietnam: Empirical evidence from the perspective of Translation Studies

Nguyen Nguyen, Dublin City University

ABSTRACT

Despite growing attention being given to the importance of translation in development work in both Translation Studies (TS) and Development Studies (DS), relatively little has been written about the practice of translation being carried out by development workers. Focusing on the particular context of Vietnam, this study is among the first attempts to investigate how translation occurs as a shared practice in emerging communities of practice (CoPs; singular CoP) of translation there. It specifically seeks to answer two research questions: (1) What translation-related and terminology problems do development workers in Vietnam face; (2) what is the current evidence for CoPs of development workers engaging in translation in Vietnam? The study reports the results of a corpus-based textual analysis of development-related documentation, which isolated the development concept of resilience as a case study. Findings from this case study provide empirical evidence of problematic translations of development terminology and suggest the emergence of potential CoPs (Wenger 1998; Fox 2000). It is argued that the knowledge developed in TS about terminology work, corpus tools, and empirical approaches may contribute to DS.

KEYWORDS

Translation, terminology, development work, Vietnam, communities of practice, corpus-based textual analysis, resilience.

1. Introduction

The principal subjects of this article are relationships between the practice of development and the practice of translation in Vietnam and the emergence of communities of practice (CoPs; singular CoP) of translation among groups of development stakeholders there. The stakeholders engage in translation as a process of collective learning (Wenger 2006) while carrying out development work in shared domains of knowledge.

First, a narrow-scope literature review provides the context for the study and focuses on the problematisation of the inter-relation between translation and development. Based on the centrality of practice in development, the context is then expanded to relate translation and/in development as a collaborative practice to key characteristics of the concept of a CoP, forming the theoretical basis of the study. A corpus-based textual analysis gathers empirical data from a range of policy papers, descriptions of translation-related jobs, and prospectuses in development in Vietnam to illustrate the difficulty of translating development-related discourse. The case of the concept resilience is highlighted in this textual analysis. Challenges in the formation of CoPs in development organisations in Vietnam are then presented, before evidence of emerging CoPs, that have come together to address the specific issue of translation in development work in Vietnam, is discussed. Relating these issues to forms of knowledge theorised in Development Studies (DS) and an increasing awareness in Translation Studies (TS) of translation issues in development, the study argues that TS and terminology work can contribute to the practice of the CoPs identified and stimulate discussions for their shared learning. Lastly, some areas for future work are identified to overcome the present study’s methodological limitations.

2. Context

Since ‘development’ was first mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles on 28th June, 1919 (Rist 2014), it has become an extremely controversial, value-laden, and complex idea that involves constantly changing dimensions and paradigms. Sumner and Tribe (2008) provide at least three definitions of development, one or more of which are either dismissed or favoured by different members of the development community. First, development is defined as a long-term, historical process of qualitative and quantitative change, which entails a successive transformation to meet people’s basic needs and improve their livelihoods. Second, development is policy-related and implementable as short- and medium-term outcomes of desirable targets such as the United Nations’ initiatives of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Third, development is a dominant discourse of Western modernity, which entails the dominance of Western approaches to development practice.

Development occurs in many different ways and in different contexts depending on how it is defined by different development actors and agencies. However, most customarily, as development becomes effective, it has been specifically referred to as the practice of development agencies (Thomas 2000). This practice is enacted through development programmes, projects, and policies to represent the solutions yielded by development experts and practitioners, which generally stress catching up with the West (Desai and Potter 2014). At this level of practice, development is directly related to the achievement of measurable goals and outcomes implemented for beneficiaries mostly in the Global South (previously underdeveloped and developing countries, also the Third World).

In the second decade of the 21st century, the idea of practice became central to definitions of development. The most clearly defined themes of practice in the development sector closely demonstrate the delivery of the SDGs. Because of the complexity of the themes, these goals interlink extensively and illustrate the blurred boundaries between the varying domains of knowledge involved; for example, politics, sociology, economics, technology, and science. Coming from these different backgrounds, development personnel worldwide are thought to number in the thousands, although figures have yet to be fully estimated and categorised¹. They see themselves as being involved in the practice of the sub-sectors of development aid, disaster relief work, and peace building. Many involved in development struggle with conceptual burdens because there is no uniform approach to particularise the domains of development knowledge (Haque 1999; Lie 2007). However, key domains have been articulated well by Escobar (1995) through his illustration of the three forms of development knowledge, namely:

1. The knowledge through which development comes into being then elaborates into objects, concepts, theories, and the like;
2. The system of power that regulates the practice of development;
3. The subjectivity fostered by the discourse of development (i.e. introduced knowledge versus vernacular knowledge in communicating development discourse to various stakeholders).

The preceding rationale justifies an intimate link between development and practice. In this practice, translation—in both the forms of language translation and the figurative translation of theory into practice—is a significant feature and plays an essential role in mediating the power tensions created between different knowledge systems; i.e. the local/popular knowledge system and the introduced and technical knowledge (Marais 2014). Translation, however, is also a highly problematic feature because, while underlined as a key element in making a development project successful or unsuccessful, its role is often overlooked (Tesseur and Crack 2020). Recent attention in research and practice in both TS and DS urges the establishment of dialogue between the two disciplines (Marais 2020; Footitt et al. 2020).

Five general problems of translation in development practice can be identified. The first relates to the figurative translation of development as discourse, a meaning-making practice and, more broadly, a system of knowledge (Escobar 1995; Olivier de Sardan 2005; Lie 2007; Gal et al. 2015; Tesseur and Crack 2020; Marais 2020). The second deals with the changing role of English from being an essential support to a possible threat and obstacle in many development projects (Savage and Kenny 1997; Appleby et al. 2002; Coleman 2002; Méndez García and Pérez Cañado 2005). The third involves the need for engagement with the translation of key terminology in development (Markee 2002; Maclean 2007; Cornwall and Eade 2010; Coleman 2017). The fourth points to the need for bi- and multilingual development workers to embrace the task of translation—often made invisible in many settings—in their development brokering and mediating roles in order to facilitate effective communication while maintaining existing values of local culture and knowledge (Lewis and Mosse 2006; Bernacka 2012; Delgado Luchner 2018; Roth 2018; Heywood and Harding 2020). The fifth illustrates the shortage of endeavours to create adequate policies about translation in development practice, especially in the non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector, and particularly to establish policies that recognise development workers’ language skills as part of NGOs’ and local communities’ capacity building (Schäffner et al. 2014; Footitt 2017; Tesseur 2018; Footitt et al. 2020).

The above cross-disciplinary issues provide a theoretical basis to contextualise translation practices in development work, and encourage translation to be viewed as a socially regulated activity (Tesseur 2015) and a complexity (Marais 2014). With contemporary development being practice-based, it necessitates translation that involves multiple actors or agents at many levels. For example, development actors may find themselves engaged in the translation of material and policy documents and interpreting at meetings, mostly from and into English because many donors, NGOs, and development agencies originate in the Global North and use English as a lingua franca (Tesseur 2017; Roth 2018). They may also need to deal with specialist discourse in which multiple terms in local languages may be used for the English forms of development “buzzwords” and “fuzzwords” (Cornwall and Eade 2010). In a more sophisticated way, these actors might work together to make translated versions of ideas, documents, and terminology in development work consistently understandable by the people they work with. In general, as agents of translation, they might play a part in the collaborative effort to transfer knowledge and best practices to others (Lewis and Mosse 2006; Cornwall and Eade 2010). Building on the description of development practice as processes of negotiation of power and meaning (Lewis and Mosse 2006), the role of translation and language (such as in ‘institutional language’ and ‘policy language’) should also be understood as figurative and symbolic in development brokerage.

Translation and/in development can be viewed as a social discursive practice and a sociology of agents. With translation “going social” (Wolf 2010), its focus expands from language and texts to the translator and other agents involved. This rationale can be applied to understand translation as a collective practice, considering the reliance on participatory and community-based approaches in most development projects being implemented in the Global South (Tesseur and Crack 2020). It is argued in this article that the collective roles and collaborative work of those who translate as part of their development practice reflect the fundamental characteristics of a translation CoP. However, collaborative work alone does not indicate the presence of a CoP. First and foremost, contemporary practice is central (Vollenbroek 2019). In addition, a number of other key elements of CoPs have been identified and are summarised below.

• Presence (Graves 1992; Wenger 1999): how a CoP might be or has already been formed, its history, location, and membership
• Domain, community, and practice (Wenger et al. 2002; Saint-Onge and Wallace 2003): how actors are connected by sharing common goals and common practice
• Interaction and relationship (Wenger 1998; Wenger and Snyder 2000): how actors come together, maintain and foster their relationships
• Knowledge (Li et al. 2009, Mason 2014): how actors learn together while sharing their own stories, experience, expertise
• Artefacts, resources, and tools (Wenger 1998; Li et al. 2009; Pyrko et al. 2017): how actors share available artefacts and tools (as well as creating new tools and becoming resources for each other)
• Problems and practice (Li et al. 2009): how actors address problems with evidence and turn this knowledge into best practices

Overall, the research context elaborated above prompts two questions that this article attempts to answer: (1) What translation-related and terminology problems do development workers in Vietnam face; and (2) what is the current evidence for CoPs of development workers engaging in translation in Vietnam? This paper argues that analysing potential translation CoPs in development in Vietnam and elsewhere will be meaningful for the recognition it will give to the social role of translation in development work. Development workers nowadays are recognised as active agents of change (Mokoena and Moeti 2017). Through shared learning about translation with others in community settings, they become involved in networks of active social agents (Toledano-Buendía 2010) that deserve to be acknowledged and better understood. Analysing potential translation CoPs in development could also begin to address the “missing link” (Olivier de Sardan 2005) in development research in which scholarly findings about development fail to consider development practice adequately.

3. Methods and data

Corpus-based textual analysis has been used in this study to answer the research questions. This study takes a broad definition of textual analysis as a methodological tool used to understand primary linguistic and non-linguistic features of texts; such features include producer(s) of the texts, targeted readership, context and overarching ideas, and translational and linguistic equivalents produced by translation processes (Newmark 1988; Mailhac 1996; Williams and Chesterman 2002).

Three purpose-built corpora were created that constitute the empirical data of this study, including an English–Vietnamese parallel corpus of development policy documents (C1), a monolingual English corpus of development job advertisements/descriptions and terms of reference (C2), and a monolingual Vietnamese corpus of development programme prospectuses in Vietnam (C3). With availability being the main criteria for text selection, the three corpora were created through purposive and convenience sampling (Saldanha and O’Brien 2013) based on the expert judgment of the author as a development worker of fifteen years and supported by advice from former colleagues. While the author was able to access source and target texts for building C1 thanks to the network he has established with colleagues, all of the monolingual texts in C2 and C3 are in the public domain and were collected from various websites². It can be assumed that these corpora are representative of the population of such texts about development in Vietnam.

C1 consists of real, authentic, and naturally-occurring policy documents being used in development in Vietnam (Table 1). This corpus comprises ten pairs of full bilingual texts; each text in the source language (L1/English) has an equivalent translation in the target language (L2/Vietnamese). Produced and circulated over a period of approximately ten years (2009 – 2019), the original texts and their translations have equal validity and importance in use in development projects and by development stakeholders in Vietnam.

Table 1. Corpus profile of C1

As a linguistic policy corpus, C1 serves the purpose of understanding problematic terms in development work in Vietnam and their translation equivalents. By using the corpus query tool Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), textual analysis of this bilingual parallel corpus aimed to identify problematic translations of development-related terms.

In contrast, C2 and C3 are relatively small-sized, monolingual English and monolingual Vietnamese corpora respectively made up of information from recent development prospectuses available online for public use in Vietnam during the period 2015 to 2020 across various development agencies, NGOs, and programmes (Tables 2 and 3). The analysis of the two corpora was conducted again using Sketch Engine, however, this time the tool was used to interrogate the contexts of certain target keywords in the texts in a systematic way, rather than to examine the linguistic forms and building blocks that make up the corpora. Specifically, the level of analysis was Key-Word-In-Context (KWIC) to isolate mentions in the corpora of translation and translation-related concepts. This is to respond to the fact that translation-related and language skills are often made explicit and essential in job descriptions not just for professional translators/interpreters, but also for other roles in a development programme. The author operated a number of wildcard and fuzzy searches with keywords that are generally translation-related: for example, translate, translator, language training, language, project, and so on. From the results of KWIC searches, the author was able to compile a broader picture of translation-related and language-related tasks present in the prospectuses, job descriptions, and terms of reference. As keywords are presented and analysed, this methodology might better be described as corpus analysis than corpus-based textual analysis per se, though it shares similar features.

Table 2. Corpus profile of C2

Table 3. Corpus profile of C3

4. Evidence for problematic translations in development practice in Vietnamese

The English-Vietnamese parallel corpus of development policy documents, C1, was analysed to provide empirical evidence for problematic translations of concepts. Among today’s ‘buzzwords’ in development discourse identified as having contested meanings—such as sustainability, accountability, wellbeing, empowerment, and so on—resilience has come forth as a highly charged term and a case critically worthy of analysis (Cornwall and Eade 2010; Tesseur and Crack 2020). In this research, resilience was chosen as a case study, and C1 was queried to explore its equivalent terms in Vietnamese in the texts.

The aim of this case study was to demonstrate different Vietnamese equivalents for resilience and not to measure precision or to count any correct terms. As Galinski and Budin (1993) attested, it is challenging to define a correct translation for a term. Therefore, a gold standard corpus containing ‘correctly translated terms’ was not established for the study, nor were term candidates identified from this work evaluated against any gold standard data.

The term and its equivalents were retrieved through corpus queries operated on Sketch Engine by means of parallel concordances, KWIC, and frequency distribution in order to acquire knowledge from a specialised subject field (Laviosa et al. 2017). The process of corpus queries involved a number of steps.

The first step dealt with searching for the term in the English texts of the parallel corpus using Sketch Engine’s Concordance functionality (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Concordance description for the searched item resilience

The second involved searching for resilience found in the English text using the Parallel Concordance functionality, then displaying the results together with the different equivalents in the aligned Vietnamese sub-corpus as aligned translated segments (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Parallel concordance description for the searched item resilience

Finally, also using Parallel Concordance, occurrence frequencies of these different equivalents in Vietnamese were displayed after making separate queries for each equivalent (Figures 3, 4, and 5).

Figure 3. Occurrence frequency of khả năng thích ứng as the equivalent for resilience

Figure 4. Occurrence frequency of khả năng phục hồi as an equivalent for resilience

Figure 5. Occurrence frequency of khả năng ứng phó as an equivalent for resilience

From the second and third steps, at least three different equivalents in Vietnamese for resilience were observed, namely khả năng phục hồi (“ability of recovery”), khả năng thích ứng (“adaptability”), and khả năng ứng phó (“ability of endurance”). The queries yielded that resilience was translated as khả năng thích ứng most of the time with 70 hits, as khả năng phục hồi with 46 hits, and as khả năng ứng phó with 6 hits, respectively (see Table 4).

Table 4. Term list for translating resilience from English into Vietnamese

Aiming at finding indicative cases of different translations of terms, the initial objective was met. However, does this example provide anecdotal evidence that resilience is a problematic concept in translation in development work in Vietnam? Before answering this question, it is worth remembering that, while certainly conceptualised in English, the concept of resilience is not easy to understand even in English and hinders clear communication of the concept among key development actors, especially local stakeholders (Chmutina et al. 2020). Moreover, where there is a requirement to translate resilience into local languages, the challenge in translating the term clearly impacts policy-making and implementation of development initiatives at local levels (Tesseur and Crack 2020). This suggests that it is important to use a translation that is best suited to the development initiative in question.

In this study, the term list shows that khả năng thích ứng (“adaptability”) has the highest frequency as a translation of resilience in the corpus. This finding supports the claim in the literature that the translation equivalent of resilience most frequently lines up to the specific domain of climate change adaptation. Having multiple translations for resilience in the data is not necessarily problematic because there can be concepts that are labelled by different terms and still effectively communicated. The problem here is that the predominant equivalent is heavily conceptually associated with environmental discourse. However, the chosen texts in the corpus deal with much more than climate change, and resilience is used in many other (sub)domains of development beyond environmental development. This indicates that insufficient conceptual characteristics have been given for the other contexts in which resilience is mentioned. An unclear understanding of the concept could have a potential impact on policy-making and the effectiveness of the development initiative.

Acknowledging such problems as those in the case study of resilience provided a good entrance into understanding potential problems being faced by development workers on a daily basis as they translate policy documents. In the next section, analysis of C2 and C3 examined the nature of these translation tasks in more detail and was used to search for evidence of a translation CoP of development workers in Vietnam.

5. Evidence for a translation CoP of development workers in Vietnam

Analysis of C2 for mentions of translation and translation-related terms in job advertisements revealed a number of translation-related and language-related tasks and duties that were mentioned either explicitly or implicitly in the texts. Illustrative examples of how these tasks and duties appeared in the texts are provided in Figures 6 and 7.

Figure 6. Examples from concordance of translation in context in C2

Figure 7. Examples from concordance of language in context in C2

The tasks and duties mentioned have been synthesised here to indicate a typical workload and deliverables:

• Translate incoming and outgoing documents, prepare bilingual strategy and planning documents and policy documents;
• Translate training materials, including written and audio/video materials, transcribing, voice-subbing, and subtitle translation;
• Interpret at project meetings, training workshops, and other related events;
• Be responsible for quality assurance of all translation and interpreting tasks;
• Participate in ensuring timely and adequate correspondence and communication between all stakeholders;
• Manage language resources if available;
• Provide language training (often of English language) to internal staff or to other development stakeholders if required;
• Participate in data management;
• Participate in strategic planning, reporting, monitoring and evaluation, and other related tasks;
• Provide assistance to international or national staff (of a project) and relevant stakeholders in data searching and other online activities;
• Proof-read;
• Carry out project management and administration.

In practice, the above tasks seem highly interconnected, given the multimodal communication of information across English and Vietnamese among a large number of parties involved. The tasks are clearly set out as desired jobs of translators/interpreters, although very often and also explicitly embedded in those of project officers, coordinators, administrators, consultants, communication officers, assistants, and facilitators, to name a few. In other words, different stakeholders are taking on the tasks of translation and interpreting in development organisations and programmes in Vietnam.

The nature of the tasks makes clear that viewing translation in development work as a process only of interlingual interaction is limiting: the tasks also expand to the communication of development ideas in general, as well as other possible tasks categorised as project management or administration. The possible domains of knowledge from development work in this context seem heavily intertwined and, therefore, respond to the two important categorical calls made by Marais (2020): to view development as a process of meaning-making that implies within itself a translation aspect and to conceptualise translation as a semiotic process. In other words, when translation is understood as tasks of translating theory into practice and policy, it should be conceptualised semiotically rather than linguistically, allowing development patterns or trajectories to be communicated as knowledge in many contexts at an unconscious and prelinguistic level (ibid.). Given recent theoretical perspectives that translation should be examined in the socio-political and/or socio-cultural contexts of development practice (Tesseur 2017) and approached as part of a complexity (Marais 2014), addressing practical problems of translation in development work points to a practice of a complex and cross-disciplinary nature.

Furthermore, analysis of C2 in English and C3 in Vietnamese for mentions of translation and translation-related terms indicated the presence of a wide range of key stakeholders in a typical development programme in Vietnam. The categories of key stakeholders are broad, but most generally there are two types of actors who directly engage with translation: (1) trained and professional translators who have experience working in the aid and development sector, and (2) bi- and multilingual development professionals and practitioners who translate and interpret as part of their role but do not necessarily identify themselves as translators or interpreters. At various levels, there are other stakeholders who indirectly participate in or benefit from the translation process in development. These might include academics, donor agencies, NGOs, bi- and multilateral organisations, social enterprises and entrepreneurs, private sector consultants, the public sector, local government officials, project field staff/field workers, the media, villagers, farmers, community members, the general public, others who are directly and indirectly beneficiaries of development, and even those excluded from development who must bear negative impacts or lose power and opportunities as a result of the development project. Evidence for the presence of many of these other stakeholders was also found in the corpus.

The key stakeholders listed above share in and join the communication of knowledge in the development contexts of Vietnam. Their work is cross-disciplinary and their practices are highly interconnected, whether or not they have similar professional backgrounds or work experiences. The connected and diverse group of actors and stakeholders in development in Vietnam and their engagement with translation clearly feature the elements of emerging CoPs in some cases in terms of their presence (Wenger 1999) and relationship (Li et al. 2009), as well as their domain, community, and practice (Wenger et al. 2002).

Analysis of C3 continued to illuminate the complex links between organisations involved in development in Vietnam, some of which engage in translation to a greater or lesser extent. The analysis further brought into focus characteristics of CoPs. In particular, one organisation revealed in the data analysed, the Ho Chi Minh City Peace and Development Foundation (HPDF), possesses features of an emerging translation CoP.

Established on 14th January 2005, HPDF operates on a voluntary and non-profit basis within the Ho Chi Minh City Union of Friendship Organisations (HUFO) to promote the participation and contribution of the broader community, as well as local and foreign partners, in the peace, development, and international integration of Vietnam and especially of Ho Chi Minh City³. Networking and partnering with donors, goodwill ambassadors, associates, and volunteers, it also facilitates and joins studies on issues of peace, cooperation, and development aiming at the international integration of Vietnam.

In June 2020, as one of HPDF’s regular programmes, the Saigon Community of Interpreters & Translators (SGCI&T) held a seminar on the topic of The current situation and importance of translation and interpreting to the comprehensive development and integration of Vietnam. The event was attended by some seventy participants made up of professional translators and interpreters, academics, and other interested parties. Although not an academic discussion on practical problems of translation in development, the seminar was reported to be one of the first forums for professionals, translation service providers, and trainers in Vietnam to raise their voice and learn together about translation. The seminar was covered in a number of media outlets. At the seminar, participants called for the formation of a national association of translators and interpreters, which to date does not exist in Vietnam. In addition, HPDF – SGCI&T envisaged a pathway to further expand the community of interpreters and translators to the capital city, Hanoi⁴.

The message sent by HPDF – SGCI&T was that it is time for the government to pay attention to translation and translators because of their important role in the comprehensive development and integration of Vietnam. Currently, SGCI&T regularly updates its members about translation and interpreting events nationwide on their social media channel, as well as providing them with macro-level, development-related and public policy knowledge.

In fact, key CoP notions of shared learning and networks of collaborative endeavour in development practice are not new in Vietnam. Since 1993, a partnership has been jointly facilitated by the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations (VUFO) and many international NGOs (INGOs) to establish the VUFO – NGO Resource Centre, which has been active since then in serving the community of INGOs working in the country. Aiming to strengthen relationships and enhance dialogue between INGOs and key development actors in Vietnam, the initiative also works toward the sharing of information, resources, and experiences between INGOs, working groups, partners, and local organisations. As of 2015, there were some 111 INGO members and 20 active internal working groups and partnerships that brought together representatives from donors, government agencies, mass organisations, professional associations, local NGOs, INGOs, community-based organisations, and the media to share information and experiences. Working groups dealt with sustainable agriculture and natural resources, disaster management, climate change, information and communication technology, child rights, HIV-AIDS, ethnic minorities, administration, and corporate engagement, to name a few, all of which are highly prioritised fields regarded as developmental in Vietnam. These fields constitute the domains of knowledge being shared by these networks, as well as potential CoPs.

Another example of shared learning can be discussed at this point to illustrate further how diverse development stakeholders in Vietnam have been observed to deal collectively with the translation of problematic development concepts and terminology. This example of shared learning and an emergent CoP focuses again on resilience as a problematic concept and term. First articulated in 2008, the concept of resilience has been increasingly discussed by various international donors to promote Vietnam's transition toward sustainable development. As shown in the analysis of C1, there is no agreed equivalent in Vietnamese for the term, and it is often translated as khả năng thích ứng (adaptability), among other commonly used equivalents. Therefore it is easy to be confused with the concept of climate change adaptation, although the concept itself represents a multi-level approach in development practice to deal with change. In Vietnam until November 2017, resilience was never mentioned in any official government documents or speeches. As there has been no official explanation of the concept so far, resilience remains absent in the practical activities of local experts and in policy-making (AREP South Asia 2018).

In response to growing concerns about the translation of resilience in Vietnamese, various stakeholders have started to come up with solutions across various platforms such as the media, online forums, and physical events. For instance, as part of the activities to celebrate the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties between Vietnam and France, a contest entitled Creativity with Resilience – Translating the Notion of Resilience into Words and by Means of Visuals was held. It was launched by the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (HCYU) Central Committee and the French Development Agency (AFD) in Hanoi, Vietnam on 22nd August 2018. The contest called for Vietnamese youth to translate (the concept and term) resilience from English into words in Vietnamese, infographics, and video clips. A fuzzy search on the term resilience was performed on corpus C3 to indicate some of the ways in which resilience was dealt with in Vietnamese and English by contest participants (see Figure 8).

Figure 8. Mentions of resilience and the contest in C3

The aim of the contest was to raise the Vietnamese public’s—and in particular young people’s—awareness of the impact of environmental and social changes in Vietnam, thus calling for the community’s joint effort in overcoming environmental damage and promoting sustainable development. Individuals or teams with a maximum of five people of Vietnamese nationality under 35 years of age were invited to participate in the contest. The entries were graded based on the number of likes and shares on the Facebook page and on the assessment of the contest examiners. The organising board received a total of 389 entries, including 265 entries under the ‘Translation’ category, 103 infographic works, and 21 videos⁵. Held on 3rd November 2018, the awards ceremony of the contest brought together some 200 people—representatives of central and local authorities, experts, researchers, business leaders, and students—to meet, debate, share experiences, understand, and propose concrete solutions to draw the contours of a resilient future in Vietnam.

In essence, the above-mentioned initiatives and examples—a seminar, a resource centre, an outreach contest, a Facebook forum—provide initial evidence suggesting the emergence of CoPs of translation in development in Vietnam. Although not yet formalised, these communities possess strong CoP characteristics in terms of joint enterprise, mutual agreement, and shared repertoires (Wenger 1998). The recent collaborations between HPDF – SGCI&T or HCYU – AFD specifically to create novel fora to address problems of translation in development indicate the emergence of a more coherent social identity (Wenger 1999; Fox 2000) among those involved in development and translation in Vietnam. In particular, the growing CoPs involve actors who engage with translation issues in their day-to-day development work (e.g. working with similar documents either in English or Vietnamese) and use the same tools and resources to deal with these issues. Not only are potential members of these CoPs bound together by an agreement to share information and experience on translation by regular interaction (Wenger and Snyder 2000), they also share a common interest to enable dialogue about development knowledge and a growing concern about the role of translation, and specifically about the use and communication of terminology, in the development process.

6. Conclusions and future work

The author set out to explore translation-related and terminology problems that numerous development stakeholders in Vietnam face, then examined the current evidence for the emergence of CoPs among several groups of stakeholders engaging in translation and collaboratively addressing these problems. Textual analysis was used to provide empirical evidence for one notable case of translating problematic terminology from English into Vietnamese in development discourse. The case chosen was the concept of resilience, and work on its translation in Vietnam was used to highlight key features of emerging CoPs centred around two novel collaborations between development and translation practitioners: HPDF – SGCI&T and HCYU – AFD. Evidence for CoP emergence was based on the presence, relationship, common interests, regular interaction, shared domains, and practice of the stakeholders involved, despite certain barriers in terms of shared resources and tools observed in these collaborations.

Problematic terminology has real-world implications for development, and the concept of resilience studied in depth in this paper is only one example. Other well-established ‘buzzwords’ and ‘fuzzwords’ in development—such as empowerment, accountability, and participation—have contested meanings (Cornwall and Eade 2010) and are also seen by many Vietnamese development workers as problematic to perceive and translate.

The problem of terminological translation addressed in the case study signals a lack of sufficient evidence that concepts and terminology in development are understood or used consistently or as intended by stakeholders. In fact, many English concepts do not have precise equivalents in other languages, as acutely pointed out by Translators without Borders (2018). While original policy documents, papers, and textbooks in development are mostly available in English with limited translations—as was the case in the corpora compiled for this study—the majority of terminology in international development has few agreed-upon Vietnamese equivalents when concepts are introduced from ‘the outside’. The consequences created by the installation of different translations of terms and knowledge, as Salemink (2006) observes, are tensions and divergent development practice. More thorough examinations of the implications of development terminology being used in documentation and other contexts of communication will not only benefit the current debates on development discourse and terminology, but also bring to light possible ways of dealing with problematic terms in practice.

This study suggests that TS can contribute robust methodologies to bring terminological clarity to the problematic translation of certain development concepts in Vietnamese. Future enquiries to understand whether development workers would be interested in methodologies available in TS (such as terminology work and textual analysis) might be useful. Given the limited amount of published bilingual texts in development, it might be necessary to explore translation memories built by translators in development, if available to be shared. Likewise, such datasets might also be generated with or by NGO groups or other CoPs who see the need for help with translating terminology.

Power imbalances that hinder participation in the delivery of many development projects due to stakeholders’ limited access to a written or spoken form of information also need to be addressed in future work. Where English is the lingua franca of many INGOs (Tesseur and Crack 2020), but not the official language of implementation for the majority of development programmes in Vietnam, there is a huge need for project documentation to be available in English and Vietnamese at all stages of a project cycle. When interpreting is often required for meetings and in the field, at points of tension, stakeholders who are monolingual might discuss among themselves to exclude the others. Often even if a translated version is provided later on, the other parties may have the feeling that not everything is shared, and hence that they have no power in conversations.

Participatory practices and bottom-up solutions initiated by development brokerage have now become essential components in the development sector (Jacobs 2014). However, the invisibility of translation tasks (often performed by translators and development staff who translate as part of their job on the frontline) shows how the kinds of CoPs that engage in translation and/or development work have not yet been fully identified. This study was an initial attempt to delineate some emerging CoPs of translation among development workers in the Vietnam context. However, more work is needed to systematically define these communities and specific elements of their practice, especially the type of development work that typically involves translation.

The methodology adopted in this study has some limitations, which can be overcome in future research. First, considering the small size of the corpora, there is a certain level of subjectivity within the sampling. In the longer term, larger corpora with a strengthened KWIC feature consisting of more job descriptions could be used as stronger empirical evidence of translation being a significant part of development work in Vietnam. Second, the textual analysis in this study has revealed information removed somewhat from its practical implementation. For instance, we do not know from the texts the extent to which the job descriptions gathered here relate to the actual jobs nor how much of what is written in the selected prospectuses or policy documents reflect the realities of development work on the ground. The use of more qualitative methodologies, for example ethnography, to see if what is written in the job descriptions and prospectuses actually matches the real work would be beneficial. In addition, other ethnographic enquiries, such as interviews and participant observation, to gather stories from potential CoP members (for example, those identified as typical development stakeholders in Section 4, as well as translators and interpreters), would help to better define these communities and their practice. Specifically, further studies are required to know how translation is experienced by these actors, how it might happen as a collaborative practice, how problems are identified and dealt with through shared learning, how terminology and translation affect the communication of development ideas introduced into Vietnam, and how local knowledge can contribute to these processes.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the DCU Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences PhD Scholarship Programme.

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Biography

Nguyen Nguyen holds an MA in Development Studies from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and has worked as a development practitioner in Vietnam for over 15 years. Moving from development practice into academia, Nguyen is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to development, with a particular focus on translating development concepts and terminology into Vietnamese to promote effective policy interventions. His research is funded by the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University.

Email: nguyen.nguyen4@mail.dcu.ie

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