Report On C-E Translation Of Zhang Tingmo’s Lecture Notes Of The Science Of Clinical Chinese Materia Medica(chapter11,13)

This translation practice report is based on the C-E translation process of Zhang Tingmo’s Lecture Notes of the Science of Clinical Chinese Materia Medica(Chapter Eleven and Chapter Thirteen).The two chapters introduce five factors including the variety,origin,collection,storage,and processing methods that influence the clinical effect of Chinese materia medica.The original text is highly professional and academic and is worthy of deep study.In this practice report,after analyzing the original text in three aspects of lexical,syntactic and textual features,the translator points out that the original text is full of medicinal materials’ names and relevant ancient style proses;long and difficult sentences and non-subject sentences abound in the source text;it possesses clear textual structure.In light of textual function,the source text can be classified into informative-function text that gives priority to facts,knowledge and information,which requires the translator to give full play to the language function in transmitting information and pay attention to the reader’s understanding and reflection.The lexical feature allows the translator to draw on Li Zhaoguo’s three major principles of TCM term translation — Naturalness,Linguistic economy and Nationalism to make the proper nouns academic and professional.Subsequently,to realize the Nationalism of TCM terminology translation,word-level translation method put forward by Li Zhaoguo is applied to reproduce and transmit the notions of TCM without corresponding expressions in English.According to the textual characteristics,the translator employs Newmark’s text type translation theory and adopts both the semantic and communicative translation methods,but mainly uses the communicative translation method.With the word-level translation method,semantic translation method and communicative translation method,the translator performs an in-depth investigation of the source text translation to try to command the translation laws of terminologies in Chinese Materia Medica and to sum up translation experiences of TCM.And other translation techniques such as omission,additional translation,and functional shift are utilized to make translation smooth and natural.The translator also refers to the WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region(WHOIST)as a corpus to establish a professional terminology bank.On this basis,the translator strives to achieve the equivalence between the target language and the source language,to accurately transmit the original information to readers as well as to maintain the features of the source text.During the translation practice,the translator realizes that some medicinal materials have not been provided with standard translation method,which requires the translator to adopt appropriate translation strategies based on fully understanding the original text.After a comprehensive analysis,the translator generalizes about her revelation that the communicative translation method plays a dominant role in the translation of this scientific texts;the semantic translation method is an indispensable tool to convey the original information and stylistic features;when there are no corresponding expressions in the target language,the translator can make use of the advantages of word-level translation method to create English words with Chinese characteristics.Therefore,because the translation of traditional Chinese medicine is still a premature discipline,the medical translators have to select the specific translation strategies in point according to the content of the original text.