A Study Of Translation Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Terms

Traditional Chinese Medicine （TCM），with two thousand years’ history,features in its effective treatment and few side-effects. TCM has remarkabletheoretical system and unprecedented treatment mechanism, so TCM termstranslation is every critical to spread TCM toward the whole world. Despite the rapidgrowth in the popularity of TCM terms over recent decades, the westwardtransmission of TCM continues to be hampered by a number of problems due to thecultural barrier, language barrier, etc. Recently, although many scholars haverealized the importance of TCM theories to TCM practices, feasible translationtheories and standards are urgently called for.Based on the previously adopted translating principles and techniques proposedby former researchers at home and abroad, this thesis systematically analyzes thefeatures of TCM terms, emphasizes the importance and necessity of standardizingthe translation of TCM terms, and offers many illustrative examples of standardtranslations. This thesis brings out four new translating principles on the basis ofAdaptation Theory, i.e. adaptation to the context and contents of the source text,adaptation to the linguistic system of the source text, adaptation to the target cultureand adaptation to the target readers, and proposes four new corresponding translatingtechniques, namely transliteration, morpheme translation, replacing TCM terms withtheir equivalent Western medicine terms, and simplification.