A Report On The E-C Translation Of Evidence-based Medicine Reviews

The author participated in the Sinicization project of Evidence-based Medicine reviews for Cochrane from October 2018 to February 2020,and completed the translation of 20 pieces of systematic reviews,about 24,000 English words in total.The topics of the source texts cover skin cancer,diabetes,schizophrenia,fractures,post-traumatic stress disorder,diabetic macular edema and other diseases,which are divided into two types: plain language summary for systematic review and short overviews for podcast.The target audience of the translation are healthcare professionals,patients and their families,medical researchers,relevant medical institutions,organizations or people interested in healthcare knowledge under the Chinese context.All target texts have been under rigorous review and published on the Chinese Cochrane website.The author was awarded “Cochrane Volunteer Certificate” in October 2019 for her contribution.The present report is based on this English-Chinese translation experience.Under the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory,this report explored how equivalence in medical text translation was realized at language level,logical level and stylistic level,and summarized the frequently-used translation skills to achieve different types of equivalence.For equivalence at language level,zero translation and literal translation were often used,while translation skills such as addition and division were applied to achieve logical and stylistic equivalence.It is worth mentioning that “alternative translation” would be used in the translation for those podcast texts to cater for the recording purpose.Furthermore,the report proposed four factors that may affect medical translation quality,which are expected to offer practical inspirations and reference for medical translation practice and research.