[Comments on Nigel Wiseman's A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine: on the use of Western medical terms in English glossary of Chinese medicine].
Mr. Wiseman believes that Western medical terms chosen as equivalents of Chinese medical terms should be the words known to all speakers and not requiring any specialist knowledge or instrumentation to understand or identify, and strictly technical Western medical terms should be avoided regardless of their conceptual conformity to the Chinese terms. According to such criteria, many inappropriate Western medical terms are selected as English equivalents by the authors of the Dictionary, and on the other hand, many ready-made appropriate Western medical terms are replaced by loan English terms with the Chinese style of word formation. The experience obtained by translating Western medical terms into Chinese when Western medicine was first introduced to China should be helpful for developing English equivalents at present. However, the authors of the Dictionary adhere to their own opinions and reject others' experience. The English terms thus created do not reflect the genuine meaning of the Chinese terms, but make the English glossary in chaos. The so-called true face of traditional Chinese revealed by such terms is merely the Chinese custom of word formation and metaphoric rhetoric. In other words, traditional Chinese medicine is not regarded as a system of medicine but merely some Oriental folklore.
Xie
Zhu-fan
ZF
The First Clinical Medical School, Clinical Medical School, Peking University, Beijing. zhufanxie@sina.com
Liu
Gan-zhong
GZ
Lu
Wei-bo
WB
D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014177:Translations