Career
Together with François-Henri Schneider he founded the Đông Dương tạp chí (1912) as the first successful Vietnamese quốc ngữ newspaper in Hanoi. The paper was technically owned by Schneider, since only a Frenchman could obtain a license to publish a newspaper. Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh 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 Louisiana Fontaine’s Les Fables (1668) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels into quốc ngữ 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 Vietnamese character encoding system.