七夕是什么节日,时空隧道之谜,家居网上商城
I. Introduction
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is regarded as one shining pearl of the greatest cultural heritages of Chinese ancient civilizations. It is a comprehensive and unique scientific system with remarkable curative effects and few side effects during the several thousand years of medical practice and has been proved to be an extremely useful method to prevent and treat diseases. Because of the characteristics of TCM, World Health Organization recommended it as useful experience to the world and more and more people in the world began to realize its importance.
TCM has a long history. In remote ages, when our ancestors looked for food, they found that some foods had specific properties for relieving or curing certain diseases. Due to few exchanges with the outside world, TCM could not be introduced to the world in the foreign exchanges. Therefore, for thousands of years the TCM has been the tool for Chinese people alone to strengthen their bodies and prevent and treat diseases. About 200 B.C.—300 B.C., a book entitled The yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine (《黄帝内经》) appeared. This book describes the foundations of human health and illness with illuminating discussions of the doctrine of Yin-Yang and the Five Elements, etc. On the basis of ancient ideas of Yin-Yang and Five Elements, TCM strives to explain a variety of physiological and pathological phenomena and their interactions, thus forming a unique scientific system in both theory and practice. (He Qiliang, Zhang Ye, 2006:145-146)
In the ending period of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning period of the Qing Dynasty, the missionaries of the western countries started to enter China to preach and they discovered the treasure—TCM. Nevertheless, their preaching activities were forbidden by the Ming and Qing Dynasties and they were banished from China before they began to understand TCM.
Then in the end of the 18th century, the missionaries returned to China with opium and gunboats. They began to translate TCM in English according to their own understanding and in this way they introduced TCM to the world. This is regarded as the beginning of English translation of TCM. But they knew neither Chinese nor TCM, the translation during this period developed very slowly.
After the foreign missionaries left China, some Chinese people who lived in English-speaking countries tried to translate the classics of TCM into English on the basis of their memory and knowledge of TCM. These people made their contributions to TCM translation and its spread in the world.
In the 1970’s, China adopted the policy of opening to the world. The speed of the spread of TCM in the world was quickening up. For the next more than 30 years, the study on the English translation of TCM has been developed to a great degree. From 1990 till now, the development of TCM translation has become faster and faster. A theoretical and comprehensive study of TCM translation has begun. English TCM courses also have appeared which has promoted the study of TCM translation to an unprecedented height.
II．Existing Problems of English Translation of TCM
With the international exchanges and trade activities of TCM prosper day by day, there are more and more people in the world accepting the treatment of TCM nowadays. However, TCM has unique theories and its diagnostic methods are different from those of the modern medicine. In addition, the medicine literature is written in the classical Chinese, which is obscure and difficult to be understood. All these result in the particularity and difficulty of the English translation of TCM. Therefore, there are many problems in the current English translation of TCM and it can not meet the needs of the foreign exchanges of TCM by far. The inferior translation is in flood, there are a large number of inconsistent translations, inaccurate translations such as mistranslations and wrong translations. Although we have more and more translators and interpreters of the English translation of TCM and the development of the English translation is vigorous recently, there are still some problems.
2.1 Lack of Congruous Standardization
The dictionaries of TCM are in the majority, which is hard to bring about a system. In the dictionaries, readers can only obtain the isolated understanding of the concepts. They cannot understand the essential characteristics and the relations of the concepts. It is much far from mastering the systematic theories of TCM. It is commonly realized that we should have standardized translated textbooks and works on TCM to achieve the aim of spreading TCM. But in fact, we have only a few translated textbooks reflecting the system of TCM, and the translations of the classics of TCM are even rarer. This reality, to some degree, worsens the further foreign exchanges. At the same time, in many translated editions, the concepts and the terminology lack unity, their readability and the information transmission cannot meet the learners’ need. Here are some examples of the diversified English translation of some of the commonly-used concepts in TCM:
命门—gate of life; vital gate; vita port; mingmen
三焦—three warmers; three burners; three heaters; triple energizer
相火—prime-minister fire; ministerial fire; the “prime” fire; xianghuo
五脏—five solid organs; five zang-organs; five zang-viscera
六腑—six hollow organs; six fu-organs; six fu-viscera
2.2 The Inferior Translation
The inferior translations are in flood. There are a large number of mistranslations, missed translations and wrong translations in the translated works of TCM. The language of TCM is very difficult to understand. The great difference between the western and Chinese cultures and the semantic change between the classical Chinese and the modern Chinese causes great difficulty in understanding the original text in the process of translation. Therefore, it is not an easy thing to translate it into modern Chinese, the difficulty of translating it into English is greater. There are few people able and even fewer people willing to translate the TCM. Here are some examples:
《黄帝内经》 —Yellow Emperor’s Internal Medicine
《千金要方》 —Prescriptions Worth One Thousand Gold
If we consider the above translations carefully, it is very easy to find the influence of the misunderstandings about the original words on their translation.《黄帝内经》was translated as The Canon of Medicine in the English version of The Traditional Chinese Medicine Magazine in 1983, as The Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Internal Medicine and
The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine in the Chinese-English Medical Dictionary published by the People’s Health Publishing House in 1987. “黄帝” in 《黄帝内经》is obviously not the “Yellow Emperor（黄色的皇帝）” and “内经” is not “Internal Medicine（内科，内科学）”. Such versions are caused by word-for-word translation of the translators. It should be translated as: Huangdi’s Cannon of Medicine, Huangdi’s Classic on Medicine, Canon of Medicine or Neijing. (Li Zhaoguo, Zhu Zhongbao, 2002: 20)
In many English textbooks of TCM and dictionaries of the recent fifteen years, “千金”in 《千金要方》and 《备急千金要方》is all translated as “One Thousand Gold”. In addition, in dictionaries such as A Practical English-Chinese Library of Traditional Chinese Medicine(Zhang Enqin, 1990) and A Practical Chinese-English Dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine(Zhang Qiwen, 2001), it is translated in the same way. However, this translation is questionable: firstly, gold is measured with “liang” (两) in the past and gram or ounce now. How much is “one thousand gold”? Secondly, does “千金” in 《千金要方》really mean this? We all know that Sun Simiao said that a person’s life is more valuable than one-thousand-liang gold and it is boundless beneficence to save a patient’s life with a prescription in his preface of Qianjin Yaofang. Therefore, using “千金”to name his book is emphasizing its aim of relieving the people with various kinds of diseases and the importance of the prescriptions included in it. We suggest that 《千金要方》 be translated as Qianjin Yaofang with Chinese Pinyin.
2.3 The Inconsistent Translation
It is quite common that different translators of TCM use different target-language terms to describe the same source-language term. Take the Chinese word “虚”( a common word in TCM ) for example, different versions of translation of it can be listed as following:
脾虚—spleen deficiency
肝血虚—insufficiency of liver blood
脾虚泻—chronic diarrhea due to hypo function of the spleen
虚家—patient with weak constitution
虚脉—feeble pulse
虚热渴—thirst due to aesthetic heat
All the above English equivalents with the Chinese character“虚”can be found in the same dictionary compiled by Zhang Qiwen and Sun Hengshan.
One of the main reasons for this inconsistency is that TCM noun terminology itself has the phenomenon that one word has several meanings, several words share the same meaning and different terms have different meanings in different situations. Moreover, certain English words and expressions can only express certain meanings of TCM terminology. Therefore, the same TCM term possibly has different translation forms in different situations (Li Zhaoguo, Zhu zhongbao, 2002: 8). It is inevitable for the TCM noun terminology to have inconsistent translations. |
