Cultural Translation Principles For TCM Intercultural Communication From The Perspective Of Interpretive Theory

With the deepening of the exchanges between China and the western countries, the unique charm of TCM culture attracted international attention. The translators have the responsibility to promote the international communication of TCM culture, but the language and culture differences between China and the western countries have brought a lot of inconvenience to translation of TCM. TCM languages contain a large number of TCM cultural information, so it is a difficult problem for translators to accurate translate the meaning of the original text. Review the current problems of TCM cultural translation, the author believes that there are the lack of effective theories and standards to guide the translation practice, and translators excessive emphasis on word to word translation and ignore the the meaning of the original text. To ensure the achievement of the desired international communication effects, this article attempts to apply interpretive theory to the TCM cultural translation and to applicability of interpretive theory in the cultural translation of TCM.According to the interpretive theory, the author puts forward to five principles for cultural translation of TCM and two lessons to be learned from the interpretive theory. First, the acceptable principle. The translator should take target readers’ thinking habit into consideration and close to the English expression to obtain their acceptance and identity. Second, the supplementary principle. The translator should add comments to the text and make cultural compensations for the TCM language to help target language readers get rid of the vacuum of sense caused by cultural differences. Third, the flexible principle. The same word often has the different meaning in different sentences, the translator should distinguish its connotation so as to express the essence information of the source language. Fourth, the corresponding principle. Borrow some corresponding western medical terms to use. Fifth, implicative principle. The translator should grasp the sense of propriety in translation and disseminate efficient information. What’s more, there are two lessons we can learn from the interpretive theory. One is that we should improve the status of the translator, another is that we should pay attention to the construction of practical theory. In the end, this article draws the conclusion that the application of interpretive theory to the TCM cultural translation is feasible and reasonable.