A Report For EBM Text Translation Practice From The Perspective Of Contrast Between English And Chinese

This translation report is based on the author’s English-to-Chinese translation practice in the Sinicization project for the international Cochrane evidence-based medicine systematic reviews.From October 2021 to February 2023,the author has accomplished over a9,000-word translation task on various topics,including COVID-19,glioblastoma,cognitive-behavioral therapy,and obstructive pulmonary disease.All translations have been published on the Cochrane Chinese Collaboration website or are awaiting publication after final review.The language characteristics of evidence-based medicine texts mainly are mainly three-fold.First,there is a large number of professional terminologies.Second,information density results in complex sentence structures.Third,the potential audience is broad,leading to the use of various rhetorical devices and expression techniques.Based on the preceding linguistic characteristics,this report takes the comparative linguistics theory proposed by Ke(2019)as its theoretical foundation.From the perspective of English-Chinese comparison,the report presents a detailed analysis of adequate translation cases and gives a summary of the corresponding translation techniques at three levels,i.e.,lexis,grammar,and text to deal with relevant translation problems.Firstly,at the lexical level,as English is synthetic while Chinese is an analytic language,the two languages have different word makeup,morphological motivation,and lexical gaps.Therefore,techniques such as loan translation,and transforming compound words need to be used.At the grammar level,Chinese has unique grammatical structures,such as experiential aspects.Chinese also differs from English in the method of marking cases,so techniques such as transforming subject cases and adding particles can be adopted in the practical translation.At the textual level,English is prone to use a lot of anaphora,while Chinese relies more on repetition.The textual structure of English is linear development,while that of Chinese is roundabout.To ensure the compact coherence of the source text,techniques such as transforming nominatives and adjusting information structure can be resorted to.English-Chinese contrast is important to ensure the accuracy and fluency of translation,and the EBM translation techniques sorted out in this report can serve as a reference for relevant translators in their future work.