A Contrastive Study On Translation Of Three Rhetorics In Three Versions Of Huangdi’s Cannon Of Internal Medicine From Perspective Of Scheme-mapping Theory

Metaphor, Metonymy and Synaesthesia are three common rhetoric devices in our daily lives which explain relativity and similarity of different things. The three kinds of rhetorics are featured by visualization, specification and vividness. In addition, they express the abstruse and vague medical theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with simple-understanding and concise words. Furthermore, the application of such rhetoric methods makes the statement concise, powerful and comprehensive rather than affect the expression of sentence meaning. Thus, the three rhetorics are widely-used in Huangdi’s Cannon of Internal Medicine.Schema-mapping Theory is a set of theory combination of Schema Theory and Mapping Theory about the understanding and interpreting, and they both have very strong explanation power. According to the basic conception and content of Schema-mapping Theory, this paper refined and analyzed the process of TCM translation to guide translation behaviors by steps of schema decomposition, schema analysis, schema correspondence, schema compensation, schema synthesis, mapping establishment and examination.This paper collected TCM translation materials and applied related material analysis software to compare different translation of Metaphor, Metonymy and Synaesthesia in different versions of Huangdi’s Cannon of Internal Medicine involving Wu Liansheng’s version, Maoshing Ni’s version and Li Zhaoguo’s version. Besides, translation strategies and theories as well as the merits and weakness of different versions can be discussed and studied.Through statistics and case analysis guided by Schema-mapping Theory, the research aims to study from two aspects:one is horizontal comparison that is the content and structure features of the Metaphor, Mentonymy and Synaesthesia. The other one is longitudinal comparison involving translation similarities and differences, merits and discussible parts of the translation in three English versions trying to draw on each other’s strong points to put forward better translation. During translation of TCM classics, a translator obliged to do following things. Firstly, the translator should have a correct and profound understanding on the meaning and contextual culture of the classics. Secondly, the translator should use all his mastered schema theories to understand and interpret the meaning of the classics. Thirdly, the translator should select the proper schema modules to finish the process of recombination and synthesis including application of the strategies and theories. Finally, the translator should examine the mapping relationship between the source text and target text to ensure one-way translation as well as the correctness of back-translation.In summary, this paper tried to systematically analyze and study the translation of Metaphor, Mentonymy and Synaesthesia in Huangdi’s Cannon of Internal Medicine from theory to guide practice and vice versa. Therefore, the paper aims to enhance people’s interest in rhetoric translation of TCM classics, improve the quality of TCM translation, and attempt to establish a different translation mode to guide translation of TCM classics.