• 此栏目下没有热点文章
  • Jun. 16 2009    Cloudy    登陆 注册
    首页  

    The Challenge of Translating Chinese Medicine

       作者:古龙   2009-07-04
    回上一级栏目 打印本文 收藏此文 转发好友 写信给我们

    语际翻译公司 转载请注明https://www.scientrans.com
    ∗本栏目部分文章内容来自互联网,部分已经过本站编辑和整理,如有版权事宜请联系Email/MSN jesczhao@hotmail.com

    Q. And yet one frequently hear people describing Chinese as a totally chaotic language, that its characters are unwieldy and impossible to learn, that its word order and syntax are so loose and illogical that a single Chinese sentence can be translated in several different ways.
    A. That's exactly how many people experience Chinese, especially if they don't get beyond a certain learning stage. But this business of chaotic, illogical sentences, isn't this all a bit familiar? Haven't we heard this all before in another context, isn't it just what the French say about English? Let's take the classic example of "a French teacher," which the French quite correctly point out could mean either un maître français or un maître de français. Or the example that Vinay and Darbelnet use, un moteur de propulsion à jet, which we in English hopelessly distort by calling it a "jet propulsion motor," let alone a "jet motor."

    According to the French, we are suffering from cumulative linguistic breakdown by omitting these vital charnières or hinge-words such as de and à. But what the Chinese would do is take the whole example one step further and express "jet propulsion motor" in terms of their own language of course, as something like jepromo. They're even more speeded up than we are. And their language allows them to get away with it. One could in fact formulate the general equation that
    Chinese : English = English : French.
    Q. Then you're saying that Chinese in general, and especially Chinese medical language, is so much more speeded up than English that the translator has to slow it down and provide explanations in order to make things clear. But don't other people in the field recognize this?
    A. Unfortunately not. Whether it's speeded up or simply more concise, I'm not sure. Everyone in translation is accustomed to seeing a text in other languages shrink when it turns into English. But characters are intrinsically more concise than words—they take up less room and also take less time to say. English shrinks when it goes into Chinese, Chinese expands—sometimes double or triple—when it becomes English. But not too many people want to admit or even hear this. It has to be linguistic chauvinism, though that's the last thing we need in this field. Chinese Medical Linguistics is so new that there really are no experts yet, but one practitioner who knows some Chinese recently generalized that "because Chinese has 5,000 characters and English has 20,000 words," anything expressed in English is thereby far more valid than anything expressed in Chinese. His figures were totally mistaken, and the whole notion is basically pretty shaky anyway, but this is typical of the blundering and blustering going on among those trying to build a bridge in this field on both the Chinese and Western sides. But the real relationship between the two languages may end up being a bit less favorable to us. Let's suppose for a moment that the Chinese only had 3,OOO characters...
    Q. How many does it have?
    A. That's a can of worms. About the only thing people agree on is that you need from 2,000 to 3,000 for basic literacy. Beyond that we get into grounds for technical disputes—claims run from 6,000 to 40,000, and even higher...But even with only 3,000, you have to remember a Chinese character is not the same thing as a word. Benjamin Whorf said it best and first—there is no Chinese word for word.

    A character can be anything from a piece of a word, sometimes similar to a prefix or suffix, to an unbound particle to a full unmistakable word on its own to a free-standing abbreviation for a two-character phrase, which might be either one word or two words in English, or even an abbreviation for a four character construction (or "aphorism," as they're sometimes known). But let's just assume it's part of a two-character phrase, by far the most frequent construction. Here you have to visualize a table 3,000 characters across and 3,000 characters down, and wherever any of these pairs of characters intersect, you have the possibility for something like a word as we know it. That makes 9,000,000 possible slots for words in Chinese. Let's assume they put only 1% of those to practical use, that still gives them the possibility of 90,000 words, with over eight million slots left potentially free for new meanings as they come along.
    This also explains how they have been able to swallow western medical terminology whole—and numerous other western technical vocab-ularies—with only a few predictable bouts of indigestion. But it also explains why we are still just nibbling at the edges of Chinese Medicine in this country and possessed by myriad preconceptions when we try to deal with it. We may be dealing with so vast a network of ideas that we are quite literally unable to conceive of its scope or import. Also, their translations of western medical terms are much more transparent than our originals...

    上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] 下一页

  • 上一篇文章:
  •    
  • 下一篇文章: 没有了
  • 评论
    seme:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容 章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    seme:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容 章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容

    针灸汉英翻译技巧探析
    2009-5-29 12:09:05
            针灸学是中医学中的重要组成部分 ,是中华医学宝贵的遗产之一。针灸学是以中医学理论为指导,运用针刺和艾灸防病治病的一门临床学科。目前,针灸已传播到 140多个国家和地区,已成为...
    The Challenge of Translating Chinese M…
    2009-6-9 18:14:09
    Q. How does one get into something as recherché and specialized as translating Chinese medical texts?A. I suppose its what our col...
    期刊征稿
    第四届IEEE生物信息与生…
    2009-6-30 19:42:01
    基本信息 主办单位: 四川大学,IEEE生物医学工程协会(EMBS) 承办单位  开始日期 2010/06/18 结束日期  截稿日期 2009/1...
    第九届全国光电技术学术…
    2009-6-30 19:35:58
    基本信息主办单位: 中国宇航学会光电技术专业委员会承办单位 开始日期 2009/11/01结束日期 截稿日期 2009...

    Dr.Rob,资深译审
    翻译问题?英语问题?请  me!

    • 问:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    • 答:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    • 问:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    • 答:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    • 问:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    • 答:文章内容文章内容文章内容文章内容
    我的问题