Translated Abstract
With globalization, the development of medicine all over the world, and many problems that western medicines fail to solve, more and more people begin to value alternative medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as one kind of alternative medicine also attracts the attention of the medical practitioners around the world. Therefore, more and more discussions about translation of the classics of traditional Chinese medicine are focused. As English is the primary communicating language all over the world, it is therefore a primary language in translating traditional Chinese medical literature in classical Chinese in practical use. However, the classical Chinese of TCM is totally different in language characteristics from modern English, such as refined and concise wording, short length, expressions filled with profound philosophical understanding of the world, the nature and the human beings. Consequently, translating traditional Chinese medicine in classical Chinese into modern English is considered an arduous task for researchers and scholars. As one of the paramount important works in traditional Chinese medicine, the translating of Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine’s receives more and more attention. Howeve，most translators have focused their studies of Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine on such aspects as TCM terminology translation and translation methods, but not appropriateness in discourse, such as cohesive devices that show the relations of sentences. We believe that the correct transfer of the sentence relations in the classic works of traditional Chinese medicine should also be a great concern. This study aims to compare and contrast Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine•Plain Questions and its two English versions in cohesion from the discourse perspective to explore if the uses of cohesive devices between the original work and its two English versions show any differences so as to determine if the sentence relations are correctly transferred.Based on the theory of cohesion and classification of cohesive devices in Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hason in 1987, this study established three corpora including one classical Chinese version and two English versions of Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine•Plain Questions). For the two English versions, one was translated by Zhu Ming (Foreign Languages Press, 2001) and the other was translated by Li Zhaoguo (World Publishing Corporation, 2005). 96 chapters of the three corpora were selected and input into Microsoft Word as the source data. Then the data from them were categorized according to the classification of five types of cohesive devices. With the help of the software SPSS and Excel, the statistical results were demonstrated by Pie to show the percentage of each cohesive device and the Paired-Samples T-Test to examine whether all of three corpora have significant differences in occurrence frequency.The major findings of this study show that there are similarities and differences among the three corpora in the use of cohesive devices. As for similarities, all of them use more lexical cohesive devices but fewer substitution devices than they do about other types of cohesive devices, including reference, ellipsis, and conjunction. As for the differences in the use of cohesive devices among the three corpora, English versions adopt more reference, lexical cohesion as cohesive devices. The results of this study show that the English versions largely reflect the sentence relations in the original medical classical work. In other words, when traditional Chinese medicine in ancient Chinese language was translated, the differences in two langauge, i.e., the modern English language and the ancient Chinese language, are considered. It suggests that the process of translation involves compromise in language and at least discoursally in cohesive devices, the original traditonal Chinese medical work is correctly translated in both English versions. The present study is an attemp in the study of translation of traditional Chinese medical works in ancient Chinese from the apsect of discourse, specifically in cohensive studies, and it starts a new area of study in concern.
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