Translation Of Chinese Medicinal Herb Profiles:Problems And Countermeasures

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), in a broad sense, refers to the oldest and the most commonly used health care system in the world; while in a narrow sense, it implies the traditional Chinese drugs or products, the main ingredients of which are herbs. Promotion of TCM, here, mainly medicinal herbs, are increasingly important in globalization era as more and more people get to know and use Chinese medicinal herbs. The consumption of medicinal herbs in the U.S. alone is rising at approximately15%annually. And some local governments and experts in China try many ways to promote their local medicinal herbs. For example, Guangxi is planned to be built into "Southern Capital of TCM." Some institutions try to introduce and promote Chinese herbs by building up medicinal plant images database, providing both Chinese and English versions of brief introduction to many kinds of medicinal herbs. Quite a few unsatisfactory translations, however, can be found in relevant documents and websites, which, to certain degree, impede China’s TCM publicity. For example, inappropriate expressions exist in translations of indications and properties of Guangxi’s local herbs in relevant documents and mistranslations of medical terminologies are common on websites, which usually result from not so overall text analysis of herb profiles and lack of reader-orientation.This thesis aims at improving C-E translation quality of Chinese medicinal herbs by adopting Nord’s looping model. The author has found out the following problems existing in the herb profile translation, one is terminology concerned, including misunderstanding of terminologies, improper expression of terminologies and different versions for the same terminology; the other textual element concerned, including improper deletion, information redundancy, misuse of voice and inappropriate word order. Causes for the translation problems can be lack of overall text analysis and lack of reader-orientation. Nord’s looping model is proposed to guide the translation of Chinese medicinal herb profiles, which is based on her "function plus loyalty" theory, taking both original texts and readers into account. Four translation steps, according to the model, constitutes translation process, i.e. translation brief interpretation, source text analysis, translation strategy planning and target text production. Based on the four-step model, this thesis then analyzes Chinese medicinal herb profiles on intratextual and extratextual aspects and some translation techniques are proposed to improve the unsatisfactory translation versions on relevant websites and documents.This paper arrives at the conclusion that Nord’s looping model can make translation of Chinese medicinal herb profiles more effective, since it’ll make the target text function well in the target situation as well as loyal to the source text. What’s more, different problems of texts call for different translation strategies to solve. For translation problems concerning terminologies of herb profiles, free translation of functions, transliteration plus notes for cultural elements, literal translation of Chinese medicinal numbers and nominalization of the verbs are proposed. For problems concerning textual elements, omission of non-content words, addition of logical conjunctions, and transformation of voice and adjustment of word order are suitable to solve them.