A Study Of Translation Of Traditional Chinese Medicine Terms Based On Catford’s Theory

Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM) is one part of Chinese culture, and it is related to human physiology, pathology, diagnosis, treatment and science of disease prevention. The TCM has made great contributions to improvement of the people’s health, the development of national prosperity and enrichment of world medicine. It has significant effect in people’s daily health maintenance, disease prevention and treatment, and compared with Western Medicine(WM). it is convenient with little side effect. Recent years, the TCM inevitably attracts the attention of the people in the world.With the economic globalization, especially the internationalization of higher education development, there has been an emergence of the "craze" of Traditional Chinese Medicine in southeast Asia and Europe and the United States and other countries, the number of foreigners coming to China to study Traditional Chinese Medicine is on the rise. But Traditional Chinese Medicine has its own unique features which look like heterogeneous culture for western people, and it is difficult for them to understand the essence of TCM theory. In order to help them better understand Traditional Chinese Medicine, in quite a long period in history, many experts and scholars have done a lot of researches on translation of Traditional Chinese Medicine. But due to various reasons, such as lack of effective translation theory, few authoritative guiding principles and incompetence of some translators in terms of medical theory and language ability, TCM theory translation is not perfect, some mistranslation, redundancy of TL and inconsistence are often seen in translation practice.The difficulty of the TCM literature translation, largely lies in creating equivalence between theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine on the language "levels" (grammatical, graphological. lexical and phonological) and "ranks" (paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words and morphemes, etc.), together with the obstacles of the cultural differences and the huge differences between Western and Chinese Medicine concept, making TCM translation very difficult. J. C. Catford probes into the essence of language to explore the translation problems through analyzing linguistic factors affecting equivalence from the aspects of four basic levels and the five basic ranks of language. Being different from other linguists, Catford divides translation equivalence into formal correspondence and textual equivalence, and makes a distinction between them.He is the first to outline a set of relatively complete translation theory model, and boldly use probability theory in translation studies, so that he makes translation work more objective and scientific.With the continuous development of domestic and foreign language translation theories, more and more scholars are applying advanced translation theories to TCM translation work. But most of the studies can be divided into two groups, one is characterized as choosing the purely static mode of translation, too much emphasis on translation equivalence and the original term in the sense of the corresponding completely. Translators of the other group comply with the choice of the mode of dynamic translation to guide the English translation of Traditional Chinese Medicine. There are very few studies which combine "static" and "dynamic" methods within one theoretical framework, and this combination can systematically apply the translation equivalence and translation shifts theories to TCM translation practice. So from the perspective of translation equivalence, the author tries to explain how translation master-J.C. Catford interprets the translation process and influencing factors of equivalence, and tries to achieve translation equivalence on different "levels" and "ranks" in TCM theory translation, and then applies translation equivalence on three ranks an two levels to TCM terms translation. In addition, the author makes a combination of using translation equivalence and translation shifts theories, and proposes seven translation methods of TCM terms.The thesis adopts qualitative research method, and does research on the content of the following two aspects:Firstly, the analysis of the corpus. This paper selected three English versions of Huangdi Neijing-Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine translated by Li Zhaoguo, Ilza Veith, and by Wu Liansheng & Wu Qi, and some TCM terms dictionaries, and exemplifying some typical language units, then according to Catford’s translation equivalence and translation shifts theories, expounds the ways of achieving equivalence on different "ranks" and "levels" in TCM terms translation. Secondly, the author actively explores the corresponding dynamic model of translation, such as level shifts and category shifts, and puts forward suitable translation methods for TCM translation.Altogether, there are five chapters in this thesis. The first of the five chapters is an introduction, including significance of translating TCM literature, research background, research methodology, objectives of the research along with the overall structure of this thesis.Chapter Two is literature review. In this part, introduction and Characteristics of TCM terms are presented, and overseas and domestic theories on TCM terms translation from different perspectives as well as major problems in Traditional Chinese Medicine terms translation are also summarized.Chapter Three is devoted to the theoretical basis of the thesis. Catford’s translation theory is introduced at the beginning, including the main viewpoints of translation equivalence and translation shifts theories and its essence, and then Catford’s classification of translation is briefly discussed.In the first section of Chapter Four, the author concentrates on how to apply Catford’s translation theory to TCM terms translation from two aspects:translation equivalence on ranks and translation shifts. Then four principles of translating TCM terms are proposed, they are the scientific principle, the cultural principle, the concise principle and the consistent principle. Finally, eight translation methods are proposed by combining translation equivalence and translation shifts:transliteration, literal translation, morpheme translation, word loans, combination of literal translation, transliteration and morpheme translation, finally free translation under the guidance of translation shifts.The last chapter is the conclusion. A general summary is brought in this chapter, with the significance as well as limitations of the thesis being presented. And the author also recommends some suggestions for further study in the field.The originality of the thesis has three aspects. Firstly, it applies Catford’s translation theory to the translation of TCM terms based on the corpus from three English versions of Huangdi Neijing-Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine translated, and some TCM terms dictionaries. Secondly, it studies translation of TCM terms from perspectives of translation equivalence and translation shifts, which is a static-dynamic combination. Thirdly, it normalizes free translation method by applying translation shifts, and to some extent, it provides reliable reference and standard to TCM terms translation.