Medical Term Translation And Management

This paper is a translation project report.The medical translation is commissioned by an Inter-country Adoption Project of Gladney Center,in which the author,as a team leader,is responsible for translating physical examination,discharge summary,and growth report of over 10 adoptive children.As medical terms often hinder the completion of this translation project,the author decides to introduce term extracting,term translation,term bank establishment and term maintaining in detail from the perspective of term management.Term translation is part and parcel in the process of managing terms.Whether terms can be translated accurately not only relates to the quality of translation,but also provides a gauge to evaluate translators.Since there are a lot of medical terms in this project,more attention should be attached to avoid medical negligence out of mistranslation.The author adopted flexible translation skills under the guidance of Nida's Equivalence Theory such as addition,omission,and recommended a C-C-E thinking pattern in medical texts,which means realizing the intralingual translation from Chinese to Chinese first,and then proceeding Chinese to English translation.Furthermore,due to the limitation of access and technology,there are few available official medical term banks for common users.Therefore,the author compiled term lists based on the classifications such as the medicine,test item,test equipment with the other team members.After constant revision and update,relatively complete medical term banks and templates have been established for the project.This cooperation lasted for almost one year,and eventually we received the full trust and approval from our clients.Practice has proven that term management exerts a crucial role in the whole translation project for it can match the most appropriate translators,greatly improving translation effectiveness and quality.From the above,the author hopes the discussions of this translation experience will shed light on medical term translation and management in the future.