Abstract
Starting with the assumption that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language and the basic structure of Vietnamese manifests a topic-comment relation rather than a subject-predicate relation (Thompson 1965, Dyvik 1984, Hao 1991, Rosen 1998, Anh 2000), the aim of the study is to investigate the extent to which the typological differences between Vietnamese and English influence the process of translating authentic Vietnamese sentences into English. This investigation uses preliminary findings drawn from an error analysis of the Vietnamese-English translations by Vietnamese EFL students. The analysis focuses on the errors made when translating the dropped subject and empty elements of Vietnamese. This is important given the fact that the grammatical subject is always required in English but not in Vietnamese sentences. The translators for this study were 95 students from English translation classes in their first, second, third, and fourth years of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The data was collected from the translation texts of these students using the same source text. This study should help to pinpoint the potential problematic errors to which students are prone when translating the topic-comment structure of Vietnamese, and provide some practical guidelines to teachers so that they can prevent these errors from the learners in the teaching of Vietnamese-English translations.
    
Key words: translation error, error analysis, topic-comment structure, language learners

1. Introduction:

Although many studies have been carried out in error analysis and contrastive analysis in second language learning, language teaching and materials development, there have been few studies using these types of analysis with Vietnamese university students as informants. Even fewer studies have been carried out to analyse Vietnamese students’ errors in translation. To illustrate, in Spillner’s (1991) comprehensive bibliography of the field of error analysis, out of 108 studies (2% of a total 5,398) focusing on translation, none examined the syntactic errors in Vietnamese-English translation. This present study aims to fill this gap in the field of error analysis in Vietnamese-English translation. The study’s main hypothesis is that the Vietnamese topic-comment structure and its empty elements can cause some difficulties for the translation process. It is hoped that the present study will shed light on the common types of errors by Vietnamese students in translating the topic-comment structures and that it will have implications for translation pedagogy.

Although these errors may not be just translation errors, since the student informants were in the process of completing a four-year course specializing in translation, they may reveal the types of errors to be expected from students during the course of studying translation. Therefore, the problems found in this present study may help teachers and the material designers choose an appropriate pedagogical method. It needs to be stressed here that this study seeks more to aid teachers of translation rather than professional translations as such and that the informants for the research, while advanced second language learners, could be considered to be novice translators.

2. Research Questions:

1. Do Vietnamese students have problems in translating Vietnamese sentence types in which the Topic in the Topic-Comment structure of the sentence does not coincide with the Subject?  What sorts of errors do they make in translating this specific type of structure?
2. What pedagogical implications for teachers can be drawn from the findings of this study to help students deal with such errors?

3.   Definition of Topic-Comment
Originally, the term TOPIC is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the term THEME, which was coined by the Prague School of functional linguistics, following Mathesius (English translation: 1975), e.g. Firbas (1969), Danes (1974). Topic is often defined in terms of its linguistic structures, either syntactic or phonetic. It has been defined in terms of linear order – as the first expression of the sentence (e.g. Halliday, 1967), in grammatical terms – as the subject (Gundel 1974) and in intonational terms – as the non-stressed expression (Chomsky 1971). The shortcomings of these definitions lie in their inability to answer the question related to the discourse conditions under which a given expression would count as topic. According to Reinhart (1981: 57), since any parts of the same sentence can serve as a topic in different contexts of utterance, topic is a term that cannot be defined directly on the basis of syntactic structures or semantic relation. Rather, it is a pragmatic relation. 

This paper adopts the definition of topic as put forward by Hockett (1958: 201): ‘the speaker announces a topic and then says something about it’. Hockett also discusses one point that this paper aims to illustrate: in English and familiar languages of Europe, topics are usually also subjects and comments are predicates (as in example 1 below); however, it is not always the case that the sentential topic (That new book by Thomas Guernsey) coincides with the grammatical subject (I), as shown in example 2.

(1)        John / ran away
(2)        That new book by Thomas Guernsey/ I haven’t read yet.

These two examples demonstrate the typological difference between Vietnamese and English. While in English, subject is an obligatory constituent and occupies the initial position of a sentence, it may be dropped in Vietnamese. Vietnamese sentence often starts with a topic which can be taken over by any part of speech. This leads to two phenomena: (1) the subject is often dropped in Vietnamese sentence and (2) the position of a topic in Vietnamese can occupied by a grammatical subject, an adverb, an object or indirect object or simply a word semantically relating to the comment discussed in the topic.

4. Rosen (1998)’s categorization and examples from Elicitation Task:

This paper is based on the claim that Rosen (1998) has proved in her PhD thesis, that topic-comment constructions and empty elements are basic constructions in the Vietnamese language. According to Rosen’s (1998) classification, there are five types of relations that may exist between a Noun Phrase topic and the comment in Vietnamese, which will be listed below. The examples illustrating these five types are quoted directly from the text used as Elicitation Task for the present study. In case there is no sentence of such type in the Elicitation Task, Rosen’s examples from her PhD thesis are quoted. Words in italics and brackets are used to refer to dropped subject or null topic (i.e. topic of the sentence which is dropped). Where there are three capitalized lines, the first line is the analysis of Topic-Comment structure of the whole sentence, the second line is the analysis of Topic-Comment of each embedded clause. The last capitalized line is the analysis of Subject-Predicate structure of each sentence, using structuralist approach. The last line is the suggested translation, while the order of the sentence in the source text will appear at the end of the translation (see Appendix A and B for numbered sentences in the Test and the analysis of topic-comment constructions and empty pronouns of 18 sentences) (TM: Topic Marker)

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