A Tentative Study On Principles Of Medical Translation

China has a long history of medical translation. As an important branch of English for Science and Technology (EST) translation, medical translation has been drawing itself increasing attention to language workers and the studies on it has been productive to a greater or lesser degree. However, most of these studies are only focused on practical translating problems for individual words and sentences; the comprehensive and systematic study is hardly found. There is apparently lack of theoretical and practical tool available for translators in this field. Against this background, this dissertation makes a systematic analysis on the stylistic features of medical English literature to find out their effect on translation, with the aim of applying stylistic theories and linguistic theories to medical translation to analyze the principles and rules for the production of target text. The contrastive study showed medical translation is highly subject-specific, receptor-oriented and genre-specific. Therefore we put forth the following three principles as principles of medical translation: 1. faithfulness to medical content and cohesiveness to medical style, 2. equivalence to source language and appropriateness for target language, 3. conventionality and standardization. The research is only a start and much has still to be done in this field.