Structure and Word Types in Vietnamese and English Tourism Terminology

Abstract

Tourism is an important sector of the economy as it derives benefits for numerous sectors within the economy. The tourism terminology has been the subject of numerous research studies as the study of the tourism language and terminology aids in the development of tourism. This study aims to compare and contrast the tourism terminology system in the two languages, Vietnamese and English, in terminologies of structure and vocabulary in order to understand the similarities and differences of tourism terminology in the two languages. This data was collected from 11 English -Vietnamese explanatory dictionaries and English-English explanatory dictionaries. The final number of tourism terminology sampled for this study amounted to 1500 each in both Vietnamese and English. In this mixed method research study, the descriptive qualitative research method was used to describe the structural characteristics of each terminology. The direct element analysis method was used to analyze the structural characteristics of each terminology.  Each terminology was decomposed into direct and indirect elements to show how each terminology was structured in quantitative terms. Having collected the data, a comparative - contrasting method was applied to point out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese terminologies. The findings revealed that the English tourism terminology had a more concise and shorter structure, which is more nominal than the Vietnamese. Second, the Vietnamese tourism terminology is more descriptive and has a loose structure.  The study contributes to building the theory of terminology in general, and developing, enriching and standardizing the Vietnamese tourism terminology system in particular, and at the same time improving the effectuality of teaching and learning tourism specialty in Vietnam.