English translation of long Traditional Chinese Medicine terms

Abstract

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.