| Information theory is about the transmission and processing of information.Although limited to the field of communications in the beginning,it has been applied to other disciplines over time,and one of them is translation study.This thesis is based on the translation of Li Dexiu’s Tips for Pediatric Tuina,a book about traditional Chinese tuina1.Since several essential concepts have been introduced to translation study including channel capacity,communication load,noise,and so on,this thesis is going to review what scholars think these elements’ roles in translation and analyze how information theory could guide the translation of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)texts.The thesis has found that in the source text,two reasons might cause communication overload.The first one is that the language which features sentences lacking subjects and connectives,phrases lacking connectives or prepositions,and the tendency of using active voice to express passive meaning will lead to communication overload of form.And the solution is to change the structure of the source text by adding redundancy.Second,strange idea or unfamiliar theme or word collocations will cause communication overload of content.In this situation,one way is to draw out the signal by adding redundancy to decrease the text’s difficulty,and another way is to simplify the signal by removing what causes communication overload.On the other hand,there’re repetition,synonyms or sentences with the same meaning that Chinese readers think are acceptable.However,these parts,if not changed or deleted,might lead to over-redundancy,then readers’ channel can’t be fully utilized and communication will be inefficient.Thus,those should be deleted in translation.Moreover,noise may cause inconsistence between what readers receive and what the original text really is.In translation of TCM texts,noise out of cultural difference of TCM and Western medicine is most likely to cause message distortion.And it can be reduced by adding redundancy which here refers to the compensation of cultural knowledge.Information discreteness refers to the loss or variation of the original message.To reduce it,the translator shall overcome the noise brought by polysemy,words with implications or contextual meaning when decoding the source text,and paraphrase them or change the way of expression. |
