A Study On Cultural Context And Translation: Taking The English Translation Of Yin And Yang In Huang Di Nei Jing For Example

Traditional Chinese culture is extensive and profound with a time-honored history of more than five thousand years, during which the unique cultural system with brilliant distinctive features has been formed. This unique traditional Chinese culture has melted into the blood of Chinese and has become the common spirit and unique cultural gene. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is one of the outstanding unique cultural heritages of the Chinese nation, as well as an important component of medicine in the world. After several thousand years of medical practice, traditional Chinese medicine gradually formed and developed into a unique medical system, which made an indelible and substantial contribution to the well-being of people in China and abroad.In recent years, with the pace of China's opening up accelerating, the cultural exchanges between China and Western countries are also increasing. As a carrier of Chinese culture, traditional Chinese medicine has increasingly attracted the attention of the international medical field. Huang Di Nei Jing, one of the four classics of traditional Chinese medicine and the earliest extant canon of traditional Chinese medicine, was translated into different European languages, paving the way for the dissemination of traditional Chinese culture. However, due to great differences between China and the West in language, culture and medicine, translators are often faced with great difficulties in comprehending the unique concepts in this great canon with rich connotations. This thesis tries to study the translation of the Chinese concept Yin and Yang in four English versions of Huang Di Nei Jing to explore the role of cultural context in translation.Five chapters are included in this thesis. Chapter one is the introduction part. This chapter briefly introduces the purpose, the methodology and the structure of this thesis.Chapter two includes two parts. The first part has a comprehensive discussion on the development of cultural context, its present academic study as well as the relationship between cultural context and translation. The second part discusses the origin, evolution and development of Yin and Yang from geographical, philosophical and daily-life aspects.Chapter three briefly introduces the language features and the history of Huang Di Nei Jing translation as well as the translators of the four versions, laying a foundation for the comparative study and analysis of the importance of cultural context in translation.Chapter four further analyzes the role of cultural context by a comparative study on some examples of Yin and Yang quoted from those four versions. According to the valuable experiences of the translators, some necessary principles for translating the culture-loaded concepts like Yin and Yang are put forward.Chapter five is a conclusion. According to the analysis made in this thesis, it is certain that taking cultural context into consideration is very important in translating important concepts in Huang Di Nei Jing. To disseminate traditional Chinese medicine in the West, the cooperation between the excellent translators at home and abroad is quite necessary.