Research On Translation Strategies Of Chinese Pharmaceutical Instructions

Medicine plays an important role in people’s daily life. With the steady expanding of trade communication between China and other countries, more and more Chinese products find their way in the international market, satisfying the various needs of the foreign consumers. As a treasure of the Chinese traditional culture, Chinese herbal medicine has long been an essential constituent of Chinese products and culture. In recent years, the Chinese pharmaceutical products have attracted worldwide interest and attention. The potential international market is huge and the development prospect is very broad.To attract foreign customers and to take predominant positions in the market, besides the quality of the medicine itself, as an important attachment to the medicine, pharmaceutical instruction has attracted more attention than ever before and the focus is on the quality of translation. However, between China and western countries, there is a cultural and linguistic difference. Problems inevitably occur in the translation, which does harm to the good image of the products and influences the export of them., what’s worse, causes a great threat to people’s lives.Out of question, CPI translation has become an important role. On the one hand, an instruction of high translation quality, supplies consumers with complicated and precise information of the medicine; on the other hand, it takes feelings of target readers into consideration and lets them fully understand the medicine before making a decision.The difficulties of translation remain in the differences between the language and culture of the original texts and the target texts. As a special style of technological language, pharmaceutical instructions, both in English and Chinese, have their unique language features, text types, professional content—knowledge of medicine, as well as cultural background, which deserve a comprehensive and systematic study and analysis. Pharmaceutical instruction is forcefully purposeful and functional, which is to realize the goals of the source text and to give readers of the target text and readers of source text the same feeling. According to this perspective, this thesis research into the translation methods of CPI by the basic theory of functional equivalence.For the purpose of providing some practical and theoretical direction to the translators of pharmaceutical instructions, the author enters Nida’s theory of functional equivalence for the translation and investigation of such materials, points out the main features of the parallel texts which are originally written by native English speakers, thinks over different kinds of problems appearing in the translation, and summarizes some methods to translation that must be supposed to be equivalent to the functions and accurate information of the source version, and, meanwhile, terse, comprehensible, natural and clear for the readership.One research method has been employed in the empirical study:linguistic analysis of the instructions. In the linguistic analysis,10CPI samples were selected from the CPIs available in the market, while the subjects in the questionnaire study were30international students studying TCM in China, and most of them know about something.This paper, based on the framework of the functionalist translation theory, discusses the major problems in the field of CPI translation and corresponding reasons are presented. Problems involved are translation of the names of CM products, translation of their terminology, translation of the functions and indications of CPI as well as mistranslation and incomplete translation. Guided by Nida’s the theory of functional equivalence, the author puts forward some constructive suggestions for CPI translation in light of the problems summarized above, including equivalence at word level, equivalence at sentence level, equivalence at text level and equivalence at culture. This thesis aims to deal with CPI translation from the functionalist perspective and provide some enlightening recommendations and effective translation patterns for CPI translators to carry out their work and finally help CM and CM products smoothly enter the international market, expand their influence across the world and successfully promote their sales.The thesis contains six chapters. Chapter One introduces backgrounds and contents of the research and the importance of the translation of them. Chapter Two reviews the functional equivalence and current Chinese medicine translation. In Chapter Three the author lays stress on the analysis of the linguistic features of the Chinese pharmaceutical instructions, which is regarded as reference for the translations of Chinese pharmaceutical instructions. Chapter Four will discover the problems emerged in the translation and attempt to summarize translation strategy from the perspective of functional equivalence. In Chapter Five, is a conclusion on the main findings of this thesis and several suggestions for future research.