This paper aims at addressing such difficulties by analyzing a number of multi-verb constructions, including SVCs, in Vietnamese from a semanticosyntactic perspective before discussing possible English translation options with illustrative examples of translation errors collected from the assignments of graduate students at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi (ULISVNU). The paper concludes with a suggested translation process for effectively dealing with Vietnamese SVCs and multi-verb constructions. | VNU Journal of Science: Foreign Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2015) 1-10 Translation of Vietnamese Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) and/or Multi-verb Constructions into English Lâm Quang Đông* Science and Technology Office, VNU University of Languages and International Studies, Phạm Văn Đồng, Cầu Giấy, Hanoi, Vietnam Received 01 October 2015 Revised 28 November 2015; Accepted 30 November 2015 Abstract: Like many languages in West Africa, Southeast Asia, amongst others, serial verb constructions (SVCs) are popular in Vietnamese in which several verbs appear together as a single predicate indicating multiple interconnected and/or sequential subevents in a complex event. To express such a complex event, non-serializing languages like English may require multiple clauses and/or sentences. Therefore, attempts to render Vietnamese SVCs as a single English predicate in translation works may not always be successful. This paper aims at addressing such difficulties by analyzing a number of multi-verb constructions, including SVCs, in Vietnamese from a semanticosyntactic perspective before discussing possible English translation options with illustrative examples of translation errors collected from the assignments of graduate students at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi (ULISVNU). The paper concludes with a suggested translation process for effectively dealing with Vietnamese SVCs and multi-verb constructions. Keywords: SVC, multi-verb constructions, Vietnamese, English, translation. participants in the sentence semantic structure are left implicit, including the subject, or a good number of sentences contain more than one verb without clear subjects or objects. This is quite natural in Vietnamese and Kotu, two among numerous isolating and serializing languages in the Austro-asiatic family, but I had to struggle to find proper ways of rendering them in the English translation. Among the most difficult are serial verb .
