A Translation Project Report For Traditional Chinese Life Cultivation (Excerpts):Probes Into C-E Translation Of TCM Terms With Reference To Koller’s Equivalence Theory

This project is managed to complete with the aid of software Trados. By collecting the 120 TCM related terms in the course of translating the excerpts of Traditional Chinese Life Cultivation as the writer’s own TCM translating corpus, this report is going to deal with the translating difficulties caused by TCM terms with reference to Koller’s Equivalence theory.As the official textbook of higher institution of medical schools, the book mainly introduces basic concepts and fundamental theories related to life cultivation of TCM. In the book, quotations from TCM classics were employed to demonstrate the basic concepts of TCM thus; ancient Chinese also took up a certain percentage in the material. What’s more, attributing the nature of TCM materials, how to translate of TCM terms of great varieties with frequency poses a formidable barrier to translators.To be specific, difficulties caused by TCM terms refer to the following three points. The first point is the difference in the meanings of Chinese words from ancient and modern times. As time flies, some ancient Chinese words have changed their meanings in spite of the same forms and how to grasp their correct understandings presents the challenge. The second point is lack of equivalent expressions in English because certain concepts and values in TCM are exclusive in Chinese and there is no such a counterpart expression in foreign languages. The last point is caused by the inconsistency of translation. Both the translation of the book titles of TCM classics and the translation of meridian and its acupoints still lack an acknowledged standard for translators to follow.In order to address the above difficulties, the writer of the report has employed various means of translation flexibly under the guidance of Werner Koller’s Equivalence theory, such as sense for sense translation, miscellaneous translation, conventional version and code system plus pinyin and English, with the objective to realize the ideal access between the source text and the target text, so as to improve the quality of translation.