Deep Semantic Analysis Of Traditional Chinese Patent Medicine Name

The dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine to the West in recent years encouraged its translation study. Written in Classical medical Chinese, translating Chinese medical text involves a decoding process, which is largely associated with parsing the metaphoric and connotative meanings of the original text into modern Chinese. Conducted at the initial stage of translation, this procedure potentially undermines accuracy of the output. Following the proposal of translating referring to drug annotations to achieve deep semantic equivalence, the author suggests a text-oriented approach which takes heed of both the cultural identity of the original and the intelligibility of the translation and its effect on the putative readership.The present thesis explored the linguistic and socio-cultural aspects reflected in traditional Chinese medicine names with the intention of investigating from a quantitative approach the influence they have on translation. Based on the methodology of positivism, 98 samples are randomly collected and syntactic and deep semantic analyses are made. The study we have performed showed that the samples fall into 5 basic syntactic structures and that their dictions are concerned with efficacy, herb, characteristic, disease, symptom and cause. As these dictions are identified as restricted register, bilingual corpora can, therefore, be set up with the 6 translation formulas as transfer rules for machine translation. Once taken, this measure not only can meet the current demand of mass translation but helps solve the problem of multiple translations. Moreover, the findings also have a wide range of application for TCM course design and Chinese medicine name related compilation of textbook, reference book and glossary.