Translingual alteration of conceptual information in medical translation: A cross-language analysis between English and Chinese

This research investigates the phenomenon of conceptual alteration in medical article titles translation as information transfer between English and Chinese, and vice versa. The purpose of this investigation is twofold: one is to further investigate concepts altered in English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation of medical article titles, and the other is to further justify the findings from the pilot study on conceptual alteration via English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation of medical article titles.; The research corpus of 800 medical article titles in English and Chinese was selected from an existing collection of medical article titles obtained from two English medical journals and two Chinese medical journals. The observation and analysis were based on (1) The pairing of concepts in both of the original medical article titles in the source language and the translated medical article titles in the target language; and (2) The conceptual similarity and dissimilarity of the paired concepts in both original and translated medical article titles in English and Chinese.; Two kinds of conceptual alteration were observed and discussed: one was apparent conceptual alteration that was obvious and easy to notice in the presence or absence of concepts in the source and target language in translation. The other was latent conceptual alteration that was not obvious and can only be recognized by the differences between the original and translated concepts in English and Chinese. Both the omission and the addition, either apparent or latent, of concepts were assessed and analyzed in different categories. The findings from the pilot study have been verified with the findings that were obtained in this research. Additional findings from this study, e.g., the omission of English subtitles and implicit information vs. explicit information, are also discussed with examples.; The findings from this study provide useful insights into future studies on cross-language information retrieval with parallel corpora via medical translation not only between English and Chinese, but also between other languages.