In the College of Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, English is a
compulsory subject and an essential tool for students of different majors such as
Computer Science, Electronics and Communication, Nuclear Physics etc. to move
forward, becoming most up-to-date with scientific and technological advances in today’s
world.
It is recognized that the students majoring in technology often have to deal with
specific and technical documents in English, i.e. reading comprehension or translation
tasks for study purposes, so as to keep themselves well-informed of the field. To many
students, doing translation of specialized documents is a difficult and demanding task
since there are too many pitfalls in producing a good translation.
As an English teacher in charge of teaching computing English to students of
information technology, I am fully aware of students’ difficulties in doing translation of
English computer texts, which are consequences of inadequate knowledge of English and
misunderstanding of the purpose of translation.
There have been many discussions on various aspects of language and language
learning which all aim to be beneficial to language learners, facilitating their
understanding of the language so that they can master it more easily. Among those are the
study by Van Chu Thi Phuong (2004) on collocations in the English textbook on
Electronics and Telecommunications, Phuong Nguyen Thi Mai (2004) on discourse
features in written documents on Information Technology, Bac Nguyen Thi (2004)on the
translation of Electronics and Telecommunications terminologies, and so on.