A Study On C-E Translation Of Chinese Medicine Instructions Based On Peter Newmark’s Text Typology

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is the crystallization of Chinese people’s collective wisdom during a long period when they fought against the disease, thus it is of great medicinal value. In recent decades, as China joined the WTO and then issued a series of foreign cultural policies, TCM has been accepted by more and more western people, and accordingly TCM products begin to enter into the international market. For foreign consumers, the most direct and intuitive way to know about TCM products is by reading the instructions on the products. Hence, the quality of the English version of Chinese Medicine Instructions (CMI) will substantially affect the choice of consumers. Yet, it turns out to be a difficult issue for translators to deliver correct information of CMI effectively, meet the real needs of consumers, and ultimately promote the cultural exchanges in the area of international medicine.In this thesis the author tries to study it from the point of text typology aiming at selecting basic translation criteria and available translation methods. Text typology believes there is no translation strategy that can be applied to all types of texts. To make a successful translation, one should choose correspondent translation criteria and translation methods based on different types of texts. Peter Newmark, the British translator, classifies all texts into three types:the expressive text, the informative text and the vocative text. He believes that the translator should adopt corresponding translation strategies according to different text functions that the text expresses. Moreover, he holds that a text could carry more than two functions, and multiple translation strategies should be applied in its translation when needed; with that, he proposes eight translation strategies including semantic translation and communicative translation. In this thesis, the author adopts a qualitative analysis research method on eleven CMI cases from the market and their English versions based on the theory of Newmark’s text typology. Through the analysis of these eleven original texts of CMI, the author defines CMI as a comprehensive informative text with a dominating informative text function and auxiliary vocative function and aesthetic function. In addition, serious problems have been found in the use of language and the text specification during the analysis of these eleven CMI English versions, including inappropriate use of terminology, incorrect translation, omission, grammar mistakes and redundant sentence structures, etc. that neither conform to the habit of English expression nor to the Western Medicine Instructions’(WMI) linguistic features of accuracy, concision and unification. According to Newmark’s text typology, translating CMI should focus on the realization of the informative function and the retention of the vocative function and the aesthetic function as well; thus the author suggests translation principles of accuracy&economy, equivalent effects, naturalness and standardization, and a multiple translation strategy of semantic translation, communicative translation, literal translation and transliteration, etc. In general, this thesis not only provides available and effective solutions to CMI translation problems, but also provides a new translation perspective for CMI translators.