A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Huangdi Nei Jing Su Wen From The Perspective Of Cultranslation Theory

Huangdi Nei Jing (《黄帝内经》)is the earliest extant medical classic in China and is credited as top of the four TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) classics. Featuring in concise language and rich in cultural information, the book has extremely high medical, historical and literary value. It consists of two parts—Su Wen (《素问》) and Ling Shu(《灵枢》),which mainly discuss theories and principles of TCM and acupuncture respectively. Su Wen is taken as the object of this thesis.Research on the translation of Huangdi Nei Jing dates back to the year 2000. The development of the research is restricted because it is a cross-disciplinary job involving both English and TCM knowledge. From 2000 till now, only 22 relevant thesis can be found, including 11 dissertations, six among which come from one medical school supervised by one scholar in almost one year. Among the rest 5 dissertations, still two of them were from a medical school. Hence, only three dissertations were done by postgraduates majoring in English from non-medical schools. Research on the translation of Huangdi Nei Jing is unevenly developed. More joint effort from researchers majoring in English is needed. In this sense, the thesis is of some significance.Guided by Liu Miqing's(刘宓庆)Cultranslation Theory, this thesis makes a comparative study on Ilza Veith's and Li Zhaoguo's(李照国)English versions of Huangdi Nei Jing on three levels——lexicon, syntax and text. The purpose is to find how cultural factors influence translators either with the source language as their month tongue or not. The thesis also aims to reveal the differences between these two English versions that came out between a time span of 60 years.The research finds out that:1. Among the four strata of the cultural system—material stratum, institutional stratum, behavioral stratum and psychological stratum, cultural information in the psychological stratum causes most cultural barriers to Ilza Veith, a translator not with the source language as her mother tongue and leads her to misinterpretation and mistranslation of the original. Cultural information in behavioral stratum is the second. But neither of them affects Li Zhaoguo, a translator with the source language as his mother tongue, very much.2. Veith and Li employ different methods to translate cultural information in different strata. For example, Veith uses images to illustrate things that do not exist in her culture, while Li simply explains them verbally.3. Efforts are made by both translators to keep both meaning and form in congruence with those of the source text. However, Veith's dissimilation strategy is applied on syntactic level, while Li's application of dissimilation strategy is embodied in the frequent use of pin yin (or transliteration) for culture-loaded words.4. The two translations may favor readers who might like to read the original book. Both Veith's efforts of translating almost every clause into a sentence and Li's annotating with [] provide visual aids for readers to position corresponding information between the original and the translated text. But [] is overused by Li and thus makes the translation less enjoyable.Peter Newmark once said one can't do the translation once for good. The author of this thesis believes more translations of Huangdi Nei Jing focusing on different aspects and value of it will be needed in the future.