Comments on Nigel Wiseman's "A Practical Sictionary of Chinese Medicine"--on Wiseman' s literal translation.
- Author:
Zhu-fan XIE
1
;
Gan-zhong LIU
;
Wei-bo LU
;
Tingyu FANG
;
Qingrong ZHANG
;
Tai WANG
;
Kui WANG
Author Information
1. The First Clinical Medicial College, Peking University, Beijing 100034. zhufanxie@sina.com
- Publication Type:Journal Article
- MeSH:
Medicine, Chinese Traditional;
Terminology as Topic;
Translations
- From:
Chinese Journal of Integrated Traditional and Western Medicine
2005;25(10):937-940
- CountryChina
- Language:Chinese
-
Abstract:
Comments were made on the word-for-word literal translation method used by Mr. Nigel Wiseman in A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. He believes that only literal translation can reflect Chinese medical concepts accurately. The so-called "word-for-word" translation is actually "English-word-for-Chinese-character" translation. First, he made a list of Single Characters with English Equivalents, and then he replaced each character of Chinese medical terms with the assigned English equivalent. Many English terms thus produced are confusing. The defect of the word-for-word literal translation stems from the erroneous idea that the single character constitutes the basic element of meaning corresponding to the notion of "word" in English, and the meaning of a disyllabic or polysyllabic Chinese word is simply the addition of the meanings of the two or more characters. Another big mistake is the negligence of the polysemy of Chinese characters. One or two English equivalents can by no means cover all the various meanings of a polysemous character as a monosyllabic word. Various examples were cited from this dictionary to illustrate the mistakes.
