Culture-bound terminology in Vietnamese-Polish translation

Abstract

This article is to explain the basic problems of interpreting Vietnamese culture-bound terminology. The author discusses terminology related to selected customs (including concluding marriages and funerals) as well as selected examples of culture-bound legal terminology. The aim of the apper is to make readers more sensitive to problems of interpreting Vietnamese texts in which words are composed of syllables which are separated with spaces. Therefore, it may be difficult to determine where one word ends, and the other starts in a sentence. The examples provided in the paper may serve as an exemple of potential problems encountered by Vietnamese non-native speakers.