A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Medical Disease Narrative Patterns and Chinese-English Translation Strategies

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jhet.202615414

Author(s)

Boyang Liu*

Affiliation(s)

School of Foreign Languages, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China *Corresponding Author

Abstract

Chinese and western medical disease narratives are rooted in distinct philosophical traditions and cultural cognitive systems, presenting systematic differences in narrative temporality, information focus, perspective selection and discourse features. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of corpus translation studies, medical narratology and Chinese-English contrastive linguistics, this study constructs a small-scale Chinese-English comparable corpus of Chinese and western medical disease narratives. Adopting a combination of quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis, it systematically examines the multidimensional differences between Chinese and western medical disease narrative patterns, and elaborates on the constraining mechanisms of linguistic conventions, cultural cognition and medical contexts on narrative patterns. On this basis, a system of Chinese-English translation strategies is proposed. This study provides operable strategic references for the translation practice of medical disease texts, and helps improve the international communication quality of Chinese medical texts and promote the overseas dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine culture.

Keywords

Disease Narrative; Medical Narratology; Chinese-English Translation Strategies.

References

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