English translation of long Traditional Chinese Medicine terms
A corpus-based study
Apart from the importance of accurate meaning transference, the key to English translation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)
terms lies in the proper translation of term forms, in particular, of long term structures and length. This article reports on an
empirical study of the English translation of long TCM terms by the following procedures: (1) collecting 1220 TCM terms and their
English translations from dictionaries, journals and official websites related to TCM terminology translation; (2) segmenting and
POS-tagging with ICTCLAS to obtain 823 long TCM terms with 3 or more Chinese words; (3) selecting 150 out of the 823 long TCM
terms through random sampling; (4) POS-tagging the 150 English translations with CLAWS5; (5) basing on the parallel corpus and
systematically discussing the structures, term length change, translation techniques and translation regularities generalized from
the English translation of long TCM terms. The result shows nominalization, shift of some pre-modifiers into post-modifiers, and
amplification of a predicate in the 9 kinds of structural features, and some translation techniques like literal translation,
paraphrase, adaptation, amplification and simplification employed in the English translation of long TCM terms.
Keywords: long TCM terms, English translation, corpus-based study, structures, term length change, translation techniques
Published online: 26 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00018.che
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00018.che
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