Guest guest Posted October 3, 2004 Report Share Posted October 3, 2004 Dear Lingzhi, In my opinion, you are correct. No translation is possible without at least one party fluent in the target language. The best translator is one who is fluent in the target language, but also conversant in the source language. All disciplines follow this rule. If not, a translation team can do a good job. It is difficult for a native speaker to translate from their native language to a foreign language successfully, and most mainland Chinese translations have been less than ideal because of this. This is not only true with Chinese medicine, but with Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine as well. One of the problems that had a negative impact on translation for so long of Chinese medical texts was the lack of Chinese-English Chinese medical dictionaries. Many native Chinese translators were forced to use Chinese_English biomedical dictionaries, which led to much loss of accuracy and confusion in translation. The Wiseman dictionary remains the best choice out there, bar none. He has also written a number of articles about the issue of translation and terminology that could be found on the following website under resources: http://www.paradigm-pubs.com/paradigm/refs.htm On Oct 2, 2004, at 10:57 PM, lingzhi xu wrote: > > > Hi Skip, > What you've said about Wiseman's translation is really different from > my > teacher told me. And I think that is really interesting.Because > usually we think in mainland there won't be good translators, because > we speak Chinese. > Best wishes, > lingzhi > > > skip8080 <skip8080 wrote: > > Lingzhi, > I am an acupuncturist from the US living and learning in china. I'll > be in nanjing sometime soon. > For your purposes, I think Zhufan is fine. a lot cheaper, too. > As steve said, it is simplified and very " standard " . since you are not > a native english speaker, i will be > more useful i think. > As i learn more about chinese language , I find wiseman to be > " over-translated " ..I find myself looking > up the definitions of his english terms in n english dictionary! > but yes, the standardized TCM vocabulary maybe is not eloquent enough. > I just cant bring myself to say " vacuous " when i mean " xu " .. ( : > Skip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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