| There are increasingly more international communication and cooperation among all trades and professions in the age of economic globalization. China's pharmaceutical industry, especially its import and export trade, is confronted with unprecedented opportunities and challenges. China has become one of the major exporters of pharmaceutical products in the world. Although the quality of a drug is a matter of life and death, a drug package insert (DPI) with accurate and smooth Chinese-English translation has an important bearing on the overseas market penetration. It can not only instruct the patients to use the drug rationally but also enhance the reliability of the overseas medical workers and patients on the exported drugs from China.During the past decades quite a few domestic and overseas scholars have conducted researches into Chinese-English and English-Chinese DPI translation based on translation theories and have made some remarkable achievements. However, few studies in the literature have been reported to investigate DPI translation on the basis of error analysis (EA). As an important branch of applied linguistics, EA has been broadly used in the studies of writing, speaking, and second language acquisition (SLA) and only recently has it been applied to the researches into the translation of public signs and medical texts.According to Carl James'error taxonomy, our study has made an investigation into the distribution and potential causes of the common errors in Chinese-English (C-E) DPI translation of home-made drugs through identification, classification, description and diagnosis. On the basis of Eugene Nida's translation theory, some feasible strategies for Chinese-English translation of DPIs have been put forward to reduce the errors and achieve the closest natural equivalence to the original both in meaning and in style.After a pretest was proved valid, a corpus with 25 Chinese-English DPIs selected by a three-round sampling was established. The categories of linguistic errors and their causes were analyzed qualitatively on the basis of Carl James'error taxonomy (James, 2003). The distribution of errors at each language level and the frequency of error causes were computed and analyzed quantitatively with the aid of Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and SPSS16.0 software.The major findings of the study were as follows:1. A total number of 576 errors were detected from the 25 Chinese-English DPIs in the corpus, among which text errors (446, 77.43%) ranked first, followed by discourse errors (76, 13.19%) and substance errors (54, 9.38%). Text errors showed significant differences with substance and discourse errors in frequency (P<0.01) but no significant difference was found between substance errors and discourse ones (P>0.05).2. At text level, lexical errors (176, 39.46%) were outnumbered by grammar errors (270, 60.54%), but there was no significant difference between the two types in frequency (P>0.05).3. In lexical errors, semantic errors (109, 61.93%) were the main ones while formal errors (48, 27.27%) and verbosity (19, 10.80%) showed relatively low frequency, without statistical difference between the two types (P>0.05). In grammar errors, syntax errors (236, 87.41%) made up the overwhelming majority, nearly seven times of morphology errors (34, 12.59%). In syntax errors, sentence errors (159, 67.37%) significantly surpassed phrase structure errors (69, 29.24%) and intersentence errors (8, 3.39%), with statistical difference (P<0.01).4. Three diagnosis-based types of errors were detected in the study, among which intralingual errors (269, 46.70%) accounted for the largest portion, followed by interlingual errors (203, 35.24%) and communication strategy-based errors (104, 18.06%). There was no significant difference between intralingual and interlingual errors (P>0.05).We can draw the following conclusions from the study:1. Intralingual errors, the predominant errors in Chinese-English DPI translation, include misspellings, punctuation errors, grammar errors, inappropriate use of words, incoherence in discourse, etc. They are mainly caused by translators'insufficient command and inappropriate understanding of vocabulary and grammatical rules of the target language (TL). Therefore, translators should focus on the semantic relations of words, lexical collocations and grammatical rules so as to reduce intralingual errors.2. Interlingual errors will be produced when a translator transfers the native language (NL) rules to his/her translation. Mother tongue (MT) interference or negative transfer is the main cause of interlingual errors. Accordingly, translators should be fully acquainted with the linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English through contrast, analysis and induction. Moreover, they should attach much importance to developing their ways of thinking in English in order to avoid interlingual errors.3. A number of errors in Chinese-English DPI translation are closely related to the structure and style of DPIs, including inconsistency in the capitalization of subtitles, the use of informal words, redundant statements, excessive use of declarative sentences, improper choice of modal verbs, etc. Although DPIs share many features with other medical texts, they possess their unique textual structure and stylistic features, such as segmentation based on items, conciseness in wording, frequent use of imperatives, ellipses, conditional clauses, etc. Therefore, translators should have a thorough understanding of the structure and style of DPIs so as to make their renderings faithful to the original.4. The translators'language proficiency and all-round ability are of vital importance to the accuracy and smoothness of DPI translation. A qualified translator should have a good command of Chinese and English languages, related medical knowledge, translation theories and DPI translation strategies from Chinese into English.We have made a pioneer study of the common errors in C-E translation of DPIs on the basis of Carl James'EA methodology in combination with the structure and stylistic features of DPIs. In the light of the analysis of the errors and the error causes, some C-E translation strategies have been proposed according to Eugene Nida's translation theory and verified through practice. Our study will help translators and medical workers correct and eliminate errors in C-E translation of DPIs as well as other types of medical texts. Furthermore, it will shed light on the learning and teaching of C-E translation of medical texts. |
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