A Contrastive Case Study On Translation Of English Versions Of Huangdi's Cannon Of Internal Medicine Based On Translation Quality Assessment Model

Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine has attracted numerous scholars to conduct extensive and in-depth research on it from a multidisciplinary perspective ever since its advent more than two thousand years ago.With the increasingly frequent exchanges between China and the world,the spread of traditional Chinese medicine abroad has become a hot trend and more and more international medical scholars,sociologists,linguists,health fans and so on expect to have a correct and comprehensive in-depth understanding of the theoretical system and cultural connotation of traditional Chinese medicine.Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine is listed as the most important of the four classics of traditional medicine as the earliest existing medical classics in China,which is the cornerstone of traditional Chinese medicine theory and disease prevention practice,and of great significance in the inheritance and dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine culture.Since Dawson's paper Su-wen,the basis of Chinese medicine had published in 1925,the translation history of Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine has been nearly one hundred years.During this period,15 relevant English version have been published at home and abroad.In this paper,three English versions of Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine of the study are Ilza Veith(medical history researcher in America)'s version,Maoshing Ni(Famous TCM doctor and translator)'s version and Luo Xiwen(an expert in translation of ancient Chinese medical books)'s version.The first two of them were published in the United States,the other was published in China.Those three English version both at home and abroad have a certain influence and readership.There are obvious difference on methods and strategies of translation and style and structure of English version because of these difference of ages of the books,authors' background and translation purposes.This paper,on the basis of House's translation quality assessment model theory,attempts to make a contrastive analysis of the three English version'realization of textual function in the three elements of register(language,language purport,type)and the genre of function(concept function,interpersonal function and textual function)with the method of qualitative analysis,and then to make the right value judgment and finally evaluate the quality of the translation.First of all,this paper summarized the relevant research of translation quality assessment both at home and abroad,and introduced the House's theoretical background and translation quality assessment model that includes the original model and revisited model,and research methods of text comparison and analysis.And then analyze and evaluate cases of these three English versions of Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine based on House's translation quality assessment.Finally,the study conclusion is that: firstly,the evaluation of the traditional Chinese medicine classic Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine based on this model is basically reliable and practical,but not be perfectly suitable for the text with a large amount of information.Secondly,Through the analysis,comparison and statistics of text functions,we can conclude that among the five cases of the three English versions of Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine,Maoshing Ni's English version and Luo Xiwen's English version are better with fewer errors,and their English version have achieved good equivalence with the function of the original text in terms of text meaning transmission.According to the statistical ranking,Luo Xiwen's English version is the best,followed by Maoshing Ni's English version,and finally Ilza Veith's English version.Thirdly,This mode also has some limitations,such as too many parameters,unreasonable parameter settings and the lack of parameter weight allocation.This paper is a valuable attempt to apply house's translation quality assessment model in the English translation of ancient Chinese medicine books,and meanwhile gives some new perspective for the study of Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine.I hope that this study can provide some reference value for the English translation of Huangdi's Cannon of Internal Medicine.