Evaluation Of Theoretical Perspective And Its Corresponding English Translation Method For Traditional Chinese Medicine Based On Literatures Published In Chinese Core Periodicals

The academic study of English translation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in China started gaining attention in1980s. In the past three decades, researchers have explored the translation theories and strategies from different perspectives. Their work has provided a practical and theoretical foundation for the broad overseas dissemination of TCM culture. However, the systematic and comprehensive study of the TCM translation is far from enough, still less the literature review of theoretical perspectives and translation methods for the English translation of TCM. This kind of literature review is extremely essential.According to some statistics, an increasing number of articles on English translation of TCM have been published, of which papers published on the Chinese core journals only account for little proportion. During this research, China Knowledge Resources Library (CNKI) was taken as the information retrieval tool and articles between1981and2010were retrieved.208articles included in Peking University core periodical catalogue (2011edition) were taken after elimination.Articles containing theoretical perspectives were sorted out and the corresponding translation methods under the mentioned theories were also taken out. It is observed that the main theoretical perspectives were:domestication and foreignization, functional equivalence theory, relevance theory, poly system theory, and cultural schema theory; the translation methods commonly chosen were:literal translation, free translation, transliteration, borrowing translation, morphemes word building, etc. The number of literatures that cite the following theoretical perspectives and corresponding translation methods were investigated as:"domestication","foreignization","functional equivalence","poly system","relevance theory","cultural schema","literal translation","free translation","transliteration","borrowing translation","morphemes word building" and so on.First, the main research contents and theory research progress of TCM translation were summarized. Second, the theoretical perspectives and translation methods mentioned by different researchers were reviewed. Third, the guiding significance of different theoretical perspectives for the English translation of TCM was illustrated; advantages and disadvantages of different translation methods were compared and the internal connection among different theoretical perspectives in guiding TCM translation was also analyzed. The new thoughts on combined theories for English translation of TCM were carried out in order to make a macroscopic research on the theoretical perspectives and selection of translation methods for the English translation of TCM, and summarize the mainstream views on theoretical study of TCM translation to provide valuable references for further standardized researches and the establishment of TCM translation theory.