On The Syntactical Translation Of Traditional Chinese Medical Classics From The Perspective Of C-E Contrastive Analysis

With the rising of China,Chinese Traditional Medicine(TCM),one of the Chinese national heritages,has aroused strong interest of the international community. Nevertheless,in the translations of TCM classics,language problems are still commonly seen.These problems have become one of the factors that hinder TCM theories from going international.This paper is intended to search for appropriate strategies in translating TCM classics from the syntactical perspective by analyzing the theories of contrastive study between Chinese and English.This research selected Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen,a representative TCM classics,as a sample to study by analyzing from the syntactical perspective.In the light of the theories of contrastive study,Chinese syntax is distinguished from its English counterpart either in the ideational or morphological structure.In addition,analysis of contrastive study indicates that Chinese language is ideational pivotal while English is formal pivotal.Enlightened by these theories,the author proposed that when analyzing the syntax of the TCM classes,one must break away from the conventional model,which imposed the Subject-Verb(S-V) concord of English to Chinese sentences.Basing on the features of Chinese language itself,the author discovered that the sentences in Huang Di Ni Jing Su Wen can be reclassified into two major categories ---- simple-relation pattern and multi-relation pattern;then both categories of sentences can be subdivided into different patterns according to the covert relation in or between the syntactical segments.After reclassifying the sentence patterns,with a view to improving the translation quality of TCM classics,the paper performed a series of analysis on the syntactical structures in the source text(ST).Case studies were conducted on the two selected translations of Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen.A questionnaire survey was also adopted to facilitate the research on the two translations.In the end,the paper concluded that to translate classical Chinese into English idiomatically,one may deverbalize the ST in the light of its covert semantic relations,and then uncover the kernel word accordingly; afterwards,centering on the kernel word,one can recompose the sentence into the target text on the basis of the S-V concord and the syntactical relations in between.