Abstract

One of the most difficult problems in translation from French - a language in which the form of a verb phrase is mainly attached to what is called tenses, of course, in addition to this, the aspect is said to play a fairly important role in characterizing an action, a state...ete - to Vietnamese - one of the southeast Asian languages, in that the role of tenses of a verb phrase might be completely hidden by function words which interpret the characteristic of an action, an event or a state, more generally, from the aspectual point of view. Therefore, it is very necessary to find out aspectual equivalences in characterizing the verb phrase between two languages when we translate a verb phrase from phrase from French to Vietnamese. For instance, it must be essential to identify the equivalence in ways of expressing inchoation, iteration, ... etc of the verb phrase. To facilate the research, the author has investigated the possible expressions of imparfait into Vietnamese, by means of comparing its expressions in French novels translated into Vietnamese. The objective of the raw research is to make the Vietnamese learners be aware of interesting similarities in temporal expressions between French and Vietnamese as well as to help them to understand more precisely the tenses of verbs in French.