A Practice Report On The C-E Translation Of TCM’s Five-Zang Organs Health Preservation Theory (Chapter One)

This report is a C-E translation practice report.The source text is selected from TCM’s Five-Zang Organs Health Preservation Theory,written by professor Fu Jieying from Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine.This book mainly discusses the function of human organs and introduces the TCM health preservation theory and healthy life style to readers.Based on the analysis of lexical and syntactic features of the source text,this translation practice report aims to discuss the difficulties encountered in the process of translation and provide some potential methods in TCM translation.As a TCM popularization text,the text is featured by not only many classical and literary expressions of TCM,such as TCM terms and four-character structures,but also many Chinese traditional proverbs.These features are also the difficulties the author encounters.The methods the translator uses to solve the problems are listed as follow.To translate TCM terms,literal translation is adopted to maintain the Chinese language features when these terms have equivalents in English.Transliteration and literal translation with annotation is used when there are no equivalents in English.And omission is employed to avoid repetition and confusion.To translate four-character structures,verb phrases and noun phrases are employed to separately express the logic of the structures.To translate TCM proverbs,either keeping or omitting the original images is applied to smoothly convey the meaning.By writing this translation practice report,the author has a deep understanding of the characteristics of TCM health preservation texts,and also summarizes some translation methods of this text.The author hopes that this report would be of some reference and help to the translation of similar texts in the future.