| As a specialized text, medicine instructions are aimed at enhancing the safety and efficacy of drugs. They provide healthcare-providers and patients with reliable information about reasonable safe medication. English has been generally acknowledged as a lingua franca, and been widely used in import and export operations. At present, the object of English medicine instructions has aroused common interest, but scholars at home and abroad tend to have different research emphasis. Foreign studies prefer to evaluate the readability of English medicine instructions, while domestic researchers mainly focus on analysis of the translation, diction, syntax and potential relationship reflected. And few studies make an attempt to further understand their regional differences. But it's worth noting that English medicine instructions vary with each other in different countries. With the increasing globalization of pharmaceutical import and export, to improve the reading compliance of English medicine instructions can make the drugs more competitive. So research on regional diversity and its underlying causes is beneficial to conclude writing proposals for domestic pharmaceutical export. Michel Foucault holds that discourse is disciplined by a kind of "power" formed by a series of social, historical and cultural facts. So this research can find theoretical support from his discourse analysis theories.This study collects medicine instructions from three English-speaking countries (America, Britain and Australia),30 from each and altogether 90 at FDA, MHRA, TGA, and EMA's official websites, to make a comparative analysis. Methods like quantitative method and qualitative method are used to find their differences and similarities. Meanwhile, under guidance of Foucault's discourse analysis principles in his Discourse on Language, this thesis intends to offer some suggestions for domestic drug manufacturers to make well-written and properly-compiled medicine instructions for exported drugs.A series of analyses lead to three major discoveries. Firstly, English medicine instructions differentiate with each other primarily in four areas. They have different formats, including structure, composing, typeface, type size, and so on; they have varied wordings, like PI, PL and CMI; they differ with each other in morphology, taking modal verb "may" for an example, its frequency of occurrence in American PI 3.63 per thousand words on the average, while in British PL 9.52, in Australian CMI 10.88; their difference also lies in sentence pattern, such as the declarative sentence and imperative sentence. Secondly, Foucault's discourse principles accord with market economy system. That is, social "power" constructed by "external systems of exclusion", "internal systems of exclusion", and "restrictions on discourse subject" can explain why this kind of regional difference exists. Thirdly, Chinese pharmaceutical industry needs to improve itself not only in medicine development but also in its instructions' writing competence. Based on the realization of social power's significance to medicine instructions, some writing proposals can be drawn from English medicine instructions in developed countries, which have theoretical and practical significance to domestic drug export. |
PDF Full Text Request