A Survey On Limits Of Tranlatability And Translation Strategies Of Chinese Medical Interpreting

In recent years, with the rapid economic development and increasing exchanges with the world, more and more foreigners are coming to China for work, learning and travel and their demands for public services promote the development of community interpreting in China. But its limits of translatability has still been challenging for interpreters. Chinese medical interpreting, as a subclass of community interpreting, is Chinese-English interpreting which is even more difficult than English-Chinese interpreting. How to improve the quality of Chinese medical interpreting is of practical significance.This paper is a report on the author's field practice as a Chinese medical interpreter. The author analyzes and categorizes the limits of translatability of the task into two types-linguistic limit and cultural limit. The former includes lexical form and sentence structure and the latter includes cultural words, philosophical concepts, sentence structure and idiomatic expressions. Finally, the author puts forward some possible coping strategies-semantic foreignization, rhetorical domestication, note addition, simplification and idioms, for it is with flexibility to limits of translatability that the quality of Chinese medical interpreting can be improved.