Translation of temporal and aspectual information in literary texts between Vietnamese and English

[Truncated abstract] This study investigated the translation of temporal and aspectual information between Vietnamese, a language that does not have tense and only marks aspect lexically and optionally, and English, a richly tensed language with a rich aspect system. In Vietnamese, temporal location of a situation is mostly elicited from the context, or is optionally indicated by a temporal adverbial (TA). Similarly, aspectual information of a situation is primarily dependent on the context and situation type, though it can be explicitly expressed by certain aspectual markers. In English, by contrast, tense is compulsory in every finite sentence and explicitly conveys the temporal location of a situation. Likewise, aspectual meaning of a situation is made available through grammatical aspect and lexical aspect (situation type). The main aims of the study were to find out how English tenses/aspects were chosen to explicitly express the original temporal and aspectual information, which was mostly implicit in the Vietnamese source texts (ST), and to find out if and how Vietnamese aspectuo-temporal devices were utilized to convey the temporal and aspectual information, which was explicitly expressed by tenses and aspects in the English STs. The study also attempted to examine if the English original temporal and aspectual information, which was not explicitly conveyed in the Vietnamese translation by an explicit aspectuo-temporal device, could be recovered from other factors such as the situation type, rhetorical relations, context, and pragmatic inferences. The secondary aim of the study was to examine the meanings and functions of Vietnamese temporal and aspectual devices, which have not been well studied in previous research and have been under much debate, in discourse using real data...