A Report On Translating "Canada Natural Health Products License Application Guidance Document"

In face of overwhelming world trend “returning and advocating nature”, more than half of Canadians haveregularly taken Natural Health Products, such as vitamins, minerals, homeopathic medicines, traditional Chinesemedicines. Traditional Chinese medicine, as a part of Natural Health Products (NHPs) plus its complementarityto Western medicine, has been accepted and recognized by more and more consumers around the world.Translation and introduction of medical data concerning Natural Health Products is helpful to the export oftraditional Chinese medicine products. This paper mainly presents the author s translation of “Canada NaturalHealth Products License Application Guidance Document” launched by Health Canada in line with NaturalHealth Products Regulations and the implementation of the translation practice during June to September in2013when the author was an intern at the International Trade Department of Lanzhou Foci Pharmaceutical Co.,Ltd..The paper consists of six parts. Part one introduces background, significance and objectives of this report;part two is about task description, which describes source of the task, requirements of internship unit, contentand characteristics of the original text; the third part is centered on translation process, which is composed ofmaking translation plan, preparing translation tools, formulating the table of terminologies, searching for usefulmaterials relevant to drug application, choice of translation theory and strategies and the implementation oftranslation; part four is the core of the whole report, in which the author illustrates the difficulties encounteringin translation, such as lack of professional knowledge, difficulty in Chinese expressing, long and complexsentences, passive voice and translation techniques adopts in addressing these difficulties, such as division,addition, inversion; the fifth part is quality control, the author chooses two ways to guarantee quality of thetranslated version—self-proofreading and proofreading by professional personnel of the internship unit. At last,in the sixth part, the main content of the report is concluded, the author shares some experience attained intranslating the medical document and points out some limitations of this report.Based on this translation practice, the report aims to discuss the translation methods and characteristics intranslating some medical material. Through analyzing the translation process of “Canada Natural HealthProducts License Application Guidance Document”, the author hopes to provide reference for other translators ofEnglish medical works.