On Translation Strategies Of Chinese Medicine Instruction From The Perspective Of Functionalist Approaches

As an important branch of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) translation, the translation of Chinese Medicine Instruction (CMI) assumes an indispensible part in enhancing the internationalization of TCM. In this research, the author explores the problems in today's CMIs, and attempts to tackle these problems by employing the Functionalist Approaches.This thesis falls into two main parts: the first part is the review of the previous study on Functionalist Approaches, translation of TCM and CMI; the second part is the empirical study.Two research methods have been employed in the empirical study: linguistic analysis of the instructions and questionnaire.In the linguistic analysis, 10 CMI samples were selected from the CMIs available in the market, while the subjects in the questionnaire study were 30 international students studying traditional Chinese medicine in China, and most of them know something about TCM.The results showed that the CMIs in English have the following problems: the structure terms in CMIs are incomplete, and drug names and efficacy terms do not have consistent standards, and some drugs have more than one English names. Consequently, most of the CMIs fail to convey the information of Chinese Medicine in a clear and acceptable way. Functionalist Approaches, including the skopos theory, translation brief and translation participants, can play an active role in solving these problems and perfecting the translation of CMI.