Translation Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Inserts From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Patient inserts are instructions attached to their packages, which are of legalvalidity and plays an important role to guide physician and patients to have safemedical administration. In recent years, as China has frequent contact with westerncountries, translation is an inevitable route for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)to get known to the world. However, it has been found that some nonstandardtranslated inserts of TCM hamper the recognition of certain curative medicines andfinally impede TCM globalization process. Consequently, it is an unavoidableproblem that needs to be resolved to improve the translation quality of TCM inserts.To find the solutions to improve the translation quality of TCM inserts, thispaper carefully selects some translated versions from some domestic notedpharmaceutical corporations’ official websites as analyzed data. By taking thedescriptive and analytical method, problems have been found in the format as well asthe content of TCM inserts. In order to solve these translation problems, adaptationtheory is applied in this thesis, on the basis of which three principles of translatingTCM inserts have been put forward, including adaptation to the target readers’response; adaptation to target cultural background and adaptation to target linguisticstructure. With the reference of these principles, some translation strategies havebeen further suggested in guiding translation of TCM inserts. For instance,translation strategies of localization and domestication are suggested to be applied intranslating format and content of TCM inserts respectively. Finally, the conclusionhas been drawn that the translation of TCM inserts should base on these adaptationprinciples to make the translated version customers-oriented and make use offlexible translation strategies to produce an informative as well as clearly readabletext.