Qingyun Zhu, Wenqing Luo, Hongling Que

Hongling Que

30 December, 2024

TCM translation, “Huangdi Neijing”, Relevance Translation Theory, Metonymy.

“Huangdi Neijing” (“Yellow Emperor’s Internal Canon of Medicine”) is a treasured classic that has laid the foundational theories of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). As one of the earliest classics in this field, it has had a profound and lasting impact. Metonymy, a common phenomenon in TCM literature, is the use of one entity to refer to another that is closely related yet essentially distinct. This illustrates the distinct cognitive framework that is inherent in TCM and poses serious difficulties for the translation of these books into English. Relevance Translation Theory, which emphasizes the ideal correlation between the source and target texts, provides a new approach for translating TCM metonymy into English. Drawing upon this theoretical framework, this paper takes Luo Xiwen’s translation of “Huangdi Neijing” as an example to explore the English translation strategy of metonymy in TCM. The goal is to consolidate and summarize translation strategies in order to promote the international dissemination of TCM culture and to serve as a reference for future study on the English translation of TCM classics.

© 2024, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license