While temporal, aspectual and modal values in French are mainly expressed by the verb’s grammatical determinants, the expression of temporality in Vietnamese is based on lexical markers. The objective of this research was to point out the difference in the manners of expressing temporality in French and Vietnamese, and therefore to figure out the expression of temporal, aspectual and modal values in each of these languages. With these values being conveyed by grammatical determinants of the verb in French and lexical markers in Vietnamese, the analysis was first to determine the values of these elements in each language, after recalling the views of some predecessors in these areas. Then, a contrastive study of an extract of the Little Prince in French and two of its translations in Vietnamese helped to highlight not only the factors that govern the presence or absence of markers in Vietnamese, but also semantic changes and stylistic effects induced by the transition from one language to the other and the singular choice of the translator. So this research can have an immediate impact on the teaching of French language to Vietnamese learners and more widely to students learning French as a foreign language as well as for translation.
