Legal English for Vietnamese speakers: the transfer errors

Start with the fact that changes how you practise: the errors Vietnamese speakers make in English legal writing are not random, and they are not carelessness. They are systematic transfers from a grammar that does with word order and particles what English does with word endings. Vietnamese is not a simpler language than English; it is an isolating language of considerable precision that never changes the shape of a word, which means the English habit of packing grammar into endings is the exact skill your first language never had to build. That makes the errors predictable, and predictable errors can be hunted deliberately instead of feared generally. This page maps the five transfers that matter most in legal writing, and gives each one a check you can run on your own drafts.

1. Articles: the decision Vietnamese never asks you to make

Vietnamese has no articles. New referents are introduced with một plus a classifier, so một bản hợp đồng (one classifier contract) does roughly the work of "a contract". But there is no reliable Vietnamese cue for "the": known referents are handled with demonstratives like này and đó, with a bare classifier phrase, or with nothing at all, because context carries it. So the English "a" has a partial bridge from một, and the English "the" has none, which is why missing "the" is the higher-volume error.

In legal writing the article decision arrives roughly sixty times a page: "the plaintiff", "a contract" on first mention and "the contract" ever after, no article at all on doctrinal concepts like consideration and negligence. The full rules, in priority order, are on the dedicated page: Articles (a, an, the) in Australian legal writing. The Vietnamese-specific advice is about method: because no instinct will warn you, articles must be a separate proofreading pass, run on every assignment.

2. Word endings: the grammar Vietnamese carries elsewhere

A Vietnamese word never changes form. Hợp đồng is the same word whether there is one contract or ten; a verb is the same word whoever performs it and whenever it happened. English pushes an unusual amount of grammar into endings, and legal English punishes the slips because so many of them are load-bearing.

Three endings do most of the damage:

• Plural "s". "The parties have exchanged contracts", not "the party have exchanged contract". The core legal plurals to watch: damages (money awarded by a court) is always plural in that meaning; proceedings and costs are plural in their core legal senses.
• Third-person "s". Vietnamese verbs never agree with a subject, so nothing warns you when the agreement "s" goes missing: "the court holds", "the respondent denies". Small, but visible in the first line it touches.
• Word-family endings. Vietnamese moves a word between noun and verb and adjective without changing it, and builds abstract nouns with a separate particle (sự vi phạm, the breach, from vi phạm, to breach). English changes the word itself: negligence, negligent, negligently; breach as noun and verb by luck the same, but decide and decision not. The transfer error is choosing the wrong family member: "the defendant was negligence" for "the defendant was negligent". The fix is a word-family check on the doctrine terms you use most: negligence/negligent, liability/liable, validity/valid, breach/in breach.

3. Tense: marked once in Vietnamese, marked always in English

Vietnamese marks time when it matters and then stops. The particles đã (completed), đang (in progress) and sẽ (future) are available but optional; usually a time expression sets the frame once and every verb after it stays bare. Tòa án đã bác đơn kháng cáo (the court dismissed the appeal) carries đã once; the rest of the narrative would not repeat it. English forces a tense onto every finite verb, and legal writing adds a convention on top: past tense for the facts and for what a court did ("the court dismissed the appeal"), present tense for propositions of current law ("the rule requires clear words").

The transfer error is the half-marked narrative: "The plaintiff signed the contract on 1 March and deliver the goods late", where the first verb carries the past and the second is bare, exactly as Vietnamese would have it. The second error is tense drift between past facts and present law with no legal reason for the switch. The fix is mechanical and works: one proofreading pass reading only the verbs, asking of each one "is this reporting an event, or stating the law?", and confirming every event verb wears its past tense.

4. Classifiers: why English countability feels backwards

Vietnamese counts through classifiers: một bản hợp đồng (a contract, with bản for documents), một vụ kiện (a lawsuit, with vụ for events and cases), một lời khuyên (a piece of advice, with lời for speech). The classifier individuates, so in Vietnamese anything can be counted one unit at a time. English instead splits nouns into countable and uncountable, and legal English concentrates its uncountables in exactly the places you write most.

The trap is that the Vietnamese phrase makes the English uncountable feel countable. Một lời khuyên feels like "an advice"; những thông tin feels like "informations"; những bằng chứng feels like "evidences". None of those exist in legal English. The short list to learn as vocabulary:

• evidence, never "evidences": "three pieces of evidence", "further evidence"
• information, never "informations" (in ordinary usage)
• advice, never "advices": "my advice is", "a piece of advice"
• legislation, never "legislations": "the legislation provides"
• case law, never "case laws"

Note the near-miss pair: authority is uncountable when it means power ("the tribunal lacked authority") but countable when it means a cited case ("the leading authorities").

5. Register calques: phrases that translate word-perfect and land wrong

Word-for-word translation of a Vietnamese formal phrase often produces English that is grammatical and one register away from the convention. Three patterns recur in legal writing.

The opinion opener. Theo tôi translates directly as "according to me", and the direct translation is never used in English: "according to" is reserved for other people's views and sources ("according to the plaintiff"). For your own position, legal English uses "in my view" in an advice, or the impersonal "it is submitted that" in an essay or memorandum.

Deference in correspondence. Vietnamese formal writing opens with kính gửi and kính thưa, respect built into the salutation, and the calque produces "Dear respected Professor" or "I am very sorry to bother you". English professional register carries respect through precision and brevity instead: "Dear Professor Tran", a one-line reason for writing, a clear request. Warmth is fine; ceremony reads as distance.

One Vietnamese verb, several English ones. Vietnamese lets one verb cover ground that Australian legal English splits by object, and the calque picks the wrong partner:

• vi phạm covers breaching, contravening and infringing, but English splits it: you breach a contract or a duty, you contravene a statutory provision, you infringe a right. "Violate" reads as rights talk or American usage.
• giải quyết covers solving, settling and resolving, but "solve the dispute" is the calque: parties settle a dispute, a court resolves an issue or disposes of a proceeding.
• bồi thường thiệt hại invites "compensate the damage", but English compensates the person: "compensate the plaintiff for the loss", or simply "the plaintiff recovered damages".

The full pattern, with a table of the pairings Australian legal writing expects, is at Legal English collocations.

A Vietnamese-specific self-check

Run these five passes on your next assignment, in this order, about two minutes each:

1. Articles: check every instance of party names, court, contract, and the doctrine nouns. The full checklist is on the articles page.
2. Endings: read once for final "s" (plurals and third-person verbs), then check every doctrine term against its word family (negligence or negligent?).
3. Verbs: event or law? Past for events, present for current law, and no bare verb riding on an earlier one's tense.
4. The uncountable five: search your draft for evidence, information, advice, legislation, case law. No plural forms, no "a" in front.
5. Calques: search for "according to me", "solve the dispute" and "compensate the damage", and check every use of breach, contravene and infringe against its object.

Twenty minutes, and it targets exactly the errors your first language predicts, which is a far better use of proofreading time than reading the whole draft one more time and hoping.

If you would like this kind of checking done with you rather than by you alone, Legal Writing Lab is a free feedback tool for international law students writing Australian legal English. It flags the issues in your draft, explains the rule behind each one with notes that account for your first language, and never writes your work for you.