A Report On The Nanjing University Of Chinese Medicine TCM Interpreting Project

Since Chinese culture is becoming increasingly popular around the world, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has gained more and more international attention. Many foreign students have been attracted to China to study it. As a result, the demand of TCM interpreters is also on the rise. Nevertheless, it is not an easy thing to perform a successful TCM interpreting because both sufficient background knowledge and excellent interpreting skills are needed.This report is based on a TCM Interpreting Project carried out by Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, which involves three languages including Chinese, English and Portuguese. The report focuses on the author’s own Chinese-English interpreting experience and the cooperation with an English-Portuguese interpreter to discuss issues about TCM interpreting. It analyses the major issues and difficulties in the project, including insufficient TCM knowledge, interpreting information loss and difficulties in TCM terminologies interpreting. After analyzing some detailed examples, it puts forward that interpreters should strengthen pre-interpreting preparations, enhance communication among interpreters and adopt multiple methods to deal with terminologies in TCM, etc. Besides, it suggests that interpreters attach importance to problems that might appear in TCM interpreting and improve their own interpreting skills so as to enhance interpreting performance.