Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh (1882–1936) was a Vietnamese journalist and translator of Western literature in the early 20th-century during the

Nguyễn dynasty The Nguyễn dynasty (chữ Nôm: 茹阮, vi, Nhà Nguyễn; chữ Hán: 阮朝, vi, Nguyễn triều) was the last Vietnamese dynasty, which ruled the unified Vietnamese state largely independently from 1802 to 1883. During its existence, ...

. Together with François-Henri Schneider he founded the '' Đông Dương tạp chí'' (1912) as the first successful Vietnamese

Quốc ngữ The Vietnamese alphabet ( vi, chữ Quốc ngữ, lit=script of the National language) is the modern Latin writing script or writing system for Vietnamese. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Portuguese m ...

newspaper in

Hanoi Hanoi or Ha Noi ( or ; vi, Hà Nội ) is the capital and second-largest city of Vietnam. It covers an area of . It consists of 12 urban districts, one district-leveled town and 17 rural districts. Located within the Red River Delta, Hanoi i ...

. The paper was technically owned by Schneider, since only a

Frenchman The French people (french: Français) are an ethnic group and nation primarily located in Western Europe that share a common French culture, history, and language, identified with the country of France. The French people, especially th ...

could obtain a license to publish a newspaper. Its

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

sister paper was ''France-Indochine''. Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh was a 'non-communist' nationalist moderniser who sought to renew the Vietnamese culture by adopting Western ways of life. He rejected the political violence of the Restoration League, arguing in 1913 that the Vietnamese should 'use the cultural benefits of France to shut out seditious noises, so that the explosions caused by the rebels will not drown out the drums of civilization'. Vĩnh used the ''Indochina Review'' to criticize Vietnamese culture in a series of articles entitled 'Examining Our Defects'. In the 1930s, he worked together with the French and translated numerous Western literary works such as

La Fontaine's Fables Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered cla ...

and Jonathan Swift’s

Gulliver’s Travels ''Gulliver's Travels'', or ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'' is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Sw ...

into

in an attempt to introduce the Vietnamese to Western culture. Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh was also credited with devising the original set of rules for the

Telex The telex network is a station-to-station switched network of teleprinters similar to a telephone network, using telegraph-grade connecting circuits for two-way text-based messages. Telex was a major method of sending written messages electroni ...

Vietnamese character encoding system.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nguyen, Van Vinh 1882 births 1936 deaths Vietnamese journalists Vietnamese translators Translators to Vietnamese 20th-century translators 20th-century journalists