English Translation Of TCM Disease Names In Huangdi Neijing From The Viewpoint Of Adaptation And Selection

Disease names are important terms in traditional Chinese medicine(TCM). Many TCM disease names originate from Suwen of Huangdi Neijing(The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine).Different translations of disease names have been given in different English versions of this book.Such a chaos makes thorough research necessary.The research group lead by Yunzhong Shi constructed a small parallel translation corpus consisting of one Chinese and three English versions of Suwen of Huangdi Neijing at the early stage of the research.The selected English versions were translated by Zhaoguo Li,Maoshing Ni and Iliza Veith respectively.The thesis selected TCM figure and zang-fu viscera disease names in the first 34 chapters of Suwen of Huangdi Neijing according to the relevant treatises written or edited by the reputable TCM experts.Firstly the thesis classified those Chinese TCM disease names according to their nomenclatorial trait,then using the parallel translation corpus located the corresponding translations of those terms in the three English versions of Suwen of Huangdi Neijing,identified and classified the translation methods,and tabulated them.To analyze the summarized translation method tables,the thesis adopted Adaptation and Selection translation theory.The approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection is a theory raised by Gengshen Hu.The theory pays much attention to multi-dimensional transformations in the translation process.The results of the thesis are as follows:Firstly,it is the different translation ecological environments that have chosen the three translators with different knowledge backgrounds.Secondly,the proportions of the numbers of different sorts of TCM disease names are very different.Next,Different translators give different translations of TCM disease names of each sort.Lastly,the figures in the translation method tables can be read in the view of Translation as Adaptation and Selection:In the linguistic dimension,Veith's version is the most fluent and natural,but its back-translatability is poor.Li's version has good back-translatability but it is not as fluent as Veith's version.In the cultural dimension,Li's version is the most successful because of his appliance of biomedical terms under appropriate conditions.In the communicative dimension,although the three translators are in different translational eco-environments,they have all realized their communicative purposes.The results of the thesis confirm that the approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection can explain the translation process and results.With the help of such analysis,readers can smartly select the most suitable English versions for their own purposes and read them more efficiently;accordingly the translators' purposes can be realized to the greatest extent.