Translation company in Vietnam, Translation of ODA graft documents yields uncertain evidence

Inspectors are mum about evidence gleaned from the recently-completed translation of material related to the trial of an official accused of taking bribes as head of a massive Ho Chi Minh City building project.

Tran Van Truyen, Chief Inspector at the Government Inspectorate, refused to say whether the translation of 4,000-page materials, mainly in English, had provided adequate evidence of Huynh Ngoc Si’s guilt or innocence.

Si, former head of the East-West Highway and Water Environment project, is awaiting a trial for bribery and has already been convicted of abuse of power in another related case.

Si and his ex-deputy Le Qua, were arrested in February after a Japanese court convicted three executives from Tokyo-based Pacific Consultants International (PCI) of violating the Unfair Competition Prevention Law, which bans the bribing of foreign government officials

The executives, who were given suspended sentences of 18 to 24 months, admitted to bribing Si with $2.6 million between 2002 and 2006 in exchange for helping the company win a consulting contract on the project funded with Japanese official development assistance (ODA), the Japanese daily Yomiuri newspaper reported last November.

At the moment the inspectorate was unsure when the investigation would close as Vietnamese and Japanese laws are very different, said Truyen, adding that investigators would try to come to conclusion as soon as possible.

The scandal had led Tokyo to temporarily suspend aid loans to Vietnam last December. But the Japanese government announced in late February that it would resume ODA to Vietnam.

Si and Qua, meanwhile, were sentenced to jail-terms of three and two years respectively early this month for abuse of power in a scheme in which they pocketed US$67,300 in rents when leasing an office to PCI from August 2001 to November 2002.

Prosecutors later demanded longer jail terms, of between 10 to 15 years each, saying the consequences caused by the violations were far more serious than the court recognized.

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Translation project hopes to bring world thinkers to Vietnam

In an essay published in 2003, Ngo Tu Lap wrote that the country spends a great deal of money every year sending people abroad to acquire the world’s best knowledge.

But he said there was one thing we should have done a long time ago at home: having the world’s best knowledge translated into Vietnamese.

Head of the International School’s Division of Social Sciences and Economics at Vietnam National University-Hanoi, Lap is the man behind the Phan Chau Trinh Culture Foundation’s 1,000 World Classics Translation Project.

The idea, formulated four years ago, is to introduce more Vietnamese intellectuals and students to the major works of world philosophy and social thought.

“While traveling abroad, our philosophy professors cannot discuss many topics with their foreign counterparts because they haven’t had a chance to read the same books, such as the works of Plato,” he said. “Only a very few of them can read such works in their original version.”

Following Lap’s essay in 2003, a group of Vietnam’s intellectuals gathered under the calling of Nguyen Thi Binh, the country’s former deputy prime minister, and Chu Hao, the former deputy minister of Sciences, Information and Technology.

They helped establish a publishing house to implement the project. A year later, the Phan Chau Trinh Foundation was set up to help raise funds and market the project. Phan Chau Trinh was a Vietnamese nationalist and patriot at the turn of the century who advocated the overthrow of the French and the monarchy via education and peaceful popular movements of the people.

Now known as the Phan Chau Trinh Culture Foundation, the program also aims to bring Vietnamese works to the world and recognize foreign scholars’ contributions to Vietnamese cultural studies.

About a tenth of the 1,000 world classics chosen by the project have been translated so far, including John Dewey’s “Democracy and Education,” Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile: or, on Education.” The translated works have also been uploaded to the Internet and delivered free to university libraries.

Lap said the road to finish the project would be long and rough as funding has always been short.

“We are struggling with both finding the best translators and paying them,” he said. “If we pay the translator VND5 million (US$292.40) a month, and it takes at least six months on average to finish one book, then we need about VND35 billion ($2.04 million) to finish the project.”

He pointed out that the amount was more or less equal to producing a movie in Vietnam. its limit and that schools were not teaching the next generation, but instead “spiritually cloning” them.

“In Vietnam, we’re stuffing the students with the same old materials again and again. When we have a world of knowledge and it’s accessible for discovery, I think we should help them discover it,” he said.

Pham Anh Tuan, who translated John Dewey’s “Democracy and Education” and who was awarded by the foundation with a translation prize in March, said there had been suggestions about outsourcing the translation project into school projects for college students.

For example, he said students studying education or philosophy could translate the works on those subjects.

He suggested that professors could be designated to edit the students’ translated works and the works could be used as study materials in colleges and universities.

But the suggestion was never implemented, Tuan said.