A Study On English Translation Of Parallel Structures In Huangdi Neijing From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Huangdi Neijing is one of the earliest theoretical classics on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). With elegant writings, it usually adopts certain gorgeous rhetorics to expound on the profound TCM theory, among which parallelism is a commonly-used one. The prominent characteristic of the Chinese is parataxis, and this is especially manifested in parallelisms in Huangdi Neijing which are ancient Chinese. On the contrary, the prominent characteristic of the English language is hypotaxis. Consequently, how to translate the parallelisms in Huangdi Neijing in accordance with linguistic norms and codes of English in order to naturally and correctly present the connotations of the parallelisms in Huangdi Neijing is specifically discussed in this paper.The functional equivalence theory takes full account of the receptors of the target text. On the basis of being faithful to the original text, it requires some adjustments during the translation to conform to the grammar habits of the target language. This theory has significant guidance in translating TCM classics. During this study, the parallelisms in Huangdi Neijing were classified and randomly drawn. Combining the functional equivalence theory, the English versions of Huangdi Neijing translated by Li Zhaoguo and Veith respectively were compared and the English translation methods of the parallelisms were summarized. As for the simple parallelisms, the translation methods are different with the kinds and nature of reaped words. The translation steps for complex parallelisms can be generalized as "differentiating the sentences relation"、"identifying the omitted words" and "supplementing the words". The translation methods for paragraph parallelisms should be determined only after analyzing the relations among different sentence constituents and different sentences.The translation methods for the parallelisms in Huangdi Neijing were summarized in this study. On the basis of being faithful to the original text, some adjustments to the target text should be made in order to achieve the functional equivalence between the source language and target language and enhance the English translation readability. It is hoped to provide valuable references for the English translation study of the figures of speech in TCM classics.