Nationality Vietnamese Name Nguyen Vinh Died 1936, Laos | Occupation Journalist Translator Role Journalist | |
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NGUYỄN VĂN VĨNH
Nguyen Van Vinh (1882 – 1936) was a Vietnamese journalist and translator of Western literature in colonial Vietnam. Together with Francois-Henri Schneider he founded the Dong Duong tap chi (1912) as the first successful Vietnamese quoc ngu newspaper in Hanoi. The paper was technically owned by Schneider, since only a Frenchman could obtain a license to publish a newspaper. Its French sister paper was France-Indochine.
Nguyen Van Vinh was a 'non-communist' nationalist moderniser who sought to renew the Vietnamese culture by adopting Western ways of life. In the 1930s, he worked together with the French and translated numerous Western literary works such as La Fontaine’s Les Fables (1668) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels into quoc ngu in an attempt to introduce the Vietnamese to Western culture.
Nguyen Van Vinh was also credited with devising the original set of rules for the Telex Vietnamese character encoding system.