THE SEMANTIC FEATURES OF MIDWIFERY TERMINOLOGY IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

Abstract

Most documents produced today use specialized language and many of them contain terminology. Undoubtedly, terminology helps us to fully understand specific topics. People in different sectors including midwifery can communicate more effectively if they use terminology that is clearly defined. This paper aims to identify the semantic features of midwifery terminology in English and Vietnamese and then find out the similarities and differences between them. Descriptive, comparative and contrastive methods were used with 200 midwifery terms in English and 200 terms in Vietnamese from books, magazines, novels, short stories, dictionaries, the Internet and films. The findings showed that in 9 characteristics used to identify midwifery terminology, the most common feature in English is characteristics of pre-childbirth terminology and in Vietnamese is characteristics of complications of pregnancy, labor and birth. It also found out that there are a lot of similarities and some differences between them, which help the learners and our colleagues at Namdinh University of Nursing to enrich their knowledge about vocabulary interference as well as midwifery terminology in both languages.