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Article published In:
Terminology
Vol. 24:2 (2018) ► pp.181–209

English translation of long Traditional Chinese Medicine terms

A corpus-based study

| Wuhan University of Technology
| Wuhan University of Technology

Apart from the importance of accurate meaning transference, the key to English translation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) terms lies in the proper translation of term forms, in particular, of long term structures and length. This article reports on an empirical study of the English translation of long TCM terms by the following procedures: (1) collecting 1220 TCM terms and their English translations from dictionaries, journals and official websites related to TCM terminology translation; (2) segmenting and POS-tagging with ICTCLAS to obtain 823 long TCM terms with 3 or more Chinese words; (3) selecting 150 out of the 823 long TCM terms through random sampling; (4) POS-tagging the 150 English translations with CLAWS5; (5) basing on the parallel corpus and systematically discussing the structures, term length change, translation techniques and translation regularities generalized from the English translation of long TCM terms. The result shows nominalization, shift of some pre-modifiers into post-modifiers, and amplification of a predicate in the 9 kinds of structural features, and some translation techniques like literal translation, paraphrase, adaptation, amplification and simplification employed in the English translation of long TCM terms.

Keywords: long TCM terms, English translation, corpus-based study, structures, term length change, translation techniques
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1The related research of TCM terminology translation in China
    • 2.2The related research of TCM terminology translation outside of China
  • 3.Research methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Word segmentation, POS tagging and selection of long TCM terms and their samples
      • 3.2.1Word segmentation, POS tagging and revision
      • 3.2.2Selection of the long TCM terms
      • 3.2.3Random sampling of 150 samples
    • 3.3POS tagging of the English translations of the sampled long TCM terms
      • 3.3.1Chinese Pinyin transliteration
      • 3.3.2Inadequate contexts
    • 3.4Construction of the parallel corpus of long TCM terms and their English translations
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1The structures and frequencies of long TCM terms
    • 4.2Comparison of the structures and frequencies of long TCM terms and those of their English translations
    • 4.3The shifts of the syntactic structures of long TCM terms in C-E translation
    • 4.4The length change of the long TCM terms and techniques used in C-E translation
      • 4.4.1Chinese structure of “S + V + O”
      • 4.4.2Chinese structure of “S + V”
      • 4.4.3Chinese structure of “S + V + AdL”
      • 4.4.4Chinese structure of “AdL + S + V”
      • 4.4.5Chinese structure of “V + V”
      • 4.4.6Chinese structure of “AdL + V”
      • 4.4.7Chinese structure of “Pr-AdL + V + Po-AdL”
      • 4.4.8Chinese structure of “V + O”
      • 4.4.9Chinese structure of “PrM + N”
  • 5.Translation regularities for the English translation of ong TCM erms
    • 5.1Non-finite verbs in the “S + V + O” and “V + O + AdL” structures of the English translations
    • 5.2Prepositional phrases, infinitives and past participles in the “N + PoM” and “PrM + N + PoM” structures of the English translations
    • 5.3Nominal phrases of the “N”, “Pre-modifier + N” and “N + Post-modifier” structures in the English translation
    • 5.4Regularization of the English translation of some long TCM terms by means of simplification
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00018.che
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