Research On Cultural Default And Compensation In Practical Diagnosis In Traditional Chinese Medicine

With the development of China, Chinese culture has become more and more influential in the world. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as the quintessence of Chinese culture, has attracted more attention from the world. Translation of TCM works, which could be divided into classic ones and contemporary ones, is a key way for the spread of TCM. CNKI shows that the study of translation of the classics is launched in full swing. However, research of translation of contemporary TCM works is rarely conducted.Many scholars have shown great concern on the cultural connotations in the process of translation. Cultural default arises when the author omits some background information because the author and the potential readers share the same cultural background. However, cultural default has become hindrance for translation. Therefore, many studies on cultural default in the field of translation have been carried out. Retrieval of "cultural default" in CNKI shows that 183 articles were published on all the journals from 1999 to 2008,28 on the core journals. From 2003 to 2008, 58 thesis paper concerning translation of cultural default were found in CMFD. However, the study of cultural default in the field of TCM translation has just been initiated.Based on the above-mentioned background information and situation, cultural default and compensation in the modern TCM works Practical Diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine is studied with the aim of attracting people's attention and improving the quality of TCM translation.The research is carried out through qualitative approach and quantitative approach. Firstly, variations are concluded by contrasting discourses of the original Chinese version and English translation through corpus analysis. Secondly, the examples of cultural default are chosen from the text and analyzed from the following aspects:how the translator compensates the cultural default and the availability of the compensatory methods, and etc.The result shows that interpretative translation and interlinear note are used the most to compensate cultural default in the translation of Practical diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine hard translation the second, endnotes, naturalization and deletion are the less used method. Besides, creative translation is adopted too. Meanwhile, some wrong translation is found because the translator misunderstands the cultural default in the text. Based on the book Practical Diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine, the empirical study on the compensation of cultural default in the TCM translation is conducted with the aim of attracting more attention for compensation of cultural default and the translation of modern works in the field of TCM.