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          THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSLATING CHINESE MEDICINE

            An interview with Alex Gross, conducted
                        by Sandra Celt

                (Originally published in Language Monthly,
                       Nottingham, April, 1987)


            Q.   How does one get into something as
       recherche and specialized as translating Chinese
       medical texts?

     A. I suppose it's what our colleague in Mexico City recently
called El Demonio de Traduccion.  While in England, I had done
some play translations for the RSC and became fascinated with the
overall problem of putting across one culture in terms of another
without sacrificing either one's value system.  Just because a
line was funny in German or French didn't guarantee it would be
in English--a lot of other factors were at work: phonetics and
usage of course, but also the totality of values shared by a
culture.  I started looking for other outcroppings of similar
linguistic problems and collided with medicine.  What different
cultures accept as medical terminology--and even medical
treatment--could just turn out to be as arbitrary as what they
accept as humor.

            Q.  But aren't there lots of specialists working
       in this field--doctors, pharmacologists,
       anthropologists, sinologists...?

     A.  There you've hit on it.  I don't think there are a lot
of people in this field, and those that are involved are indeed
specialists: the doctors and pharmacologists, whether Chinese or
Western, don't know too much about foreign languages in general,
much less the subtleties of translating (and far less still of
linguistics), while most sinologists are fairly ignorant about
both oriental and western medicine.  Anthropologists have a fine
overall view but often have a poor eye for clinical details or
fail to relate to the other specialists.

            Q.  Precisely what are the issues in this field
       as they relate to language and linguistics?  Is there
       really anything new and important here?

     A.  I think there's something old and important.  In their
famous hypothesis, Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir raised
some eyebrows by suggesting that people speaking different
languages may be discussing quite different things when they are
allegedly talking about the same subject.  And Louis Hjelmslev,
Hans Jorgen Uldall and others of the Glossematics school actually
maintained that linguistics may be logically prior to science,
that instead of linguistics being that branch of science which
deals with language, science may in fact merely be a branch of
linguistics dealing with nature according to linguistically
predetermined prejudices, a sort of Procrustean nightmare preset
for error.  It could just be that both these theories have been
lying around like mathematical formulas awaiting a major
application to prove their validity, and Chinese Medicine may be
that application.

            Q.  How is translating Chinese Medicine
       different from other technical translation, say
       mechanics from German into English or  Islamic law
       into English, or even Oklahoma State law into Arabic?

     A.  I'd be willing to bet there's both a qualitative and a
quantitative difference, though the Arabic examples come closer
than the German one.  Let me start by telling you a story, and
then I'll become more technical.  When my wife and I lived in
Italy, she did the shopping to help her learn Italian, and she
came home complaining she couldn't get certain cuts of meat from
the butchers.  I told her to concentrate on speaking better
Italian, and it would work out.  But she still couldn't get the
cuts of meat she wanted.  Finally, I was forced to go with her to
the market place and patiently explain to various butchers in
Italian what she wanted.  But we still couldn't get it.  It
doesn't even exist.  The Italians cut their meat differently than
we do.  There are not only different names for the cuts but
actually different cuts as well.  The whole system is built
around it--they feed and breed their cattle differently so as to
produce these cuts.  So you could argue it's not even the same
steer--technically, anatomically, it might just qualify as a
different subspecies.

            Q. Are you suggesting that the Chinese may be a
       different species of human beings?

     A.  Not at all, simply that we have to be aware that in
their medical system they cut the human animal differently and
use quite different terminology than we do.   This drives some
western medical people--and others convinced our system must be
not merely the best but the only possible one--up the wall.
Probably most of the misunderstandings surrounding Chinese
Medicine in the West spring from the fact that we are poor
linguists, especially here in America.

            Q. How do they cut the human animal differently?

        A. In just about every way.  The relationships they
observe and measure are not the ones we do, the measurements and
benchmarks are not the same as ours, their interpretation of such
benchmarks will be  different from ours, the diagnosis these
suggest is not the same, and the treatment and interpretation of
a patient's progress can also radically diverge from our own.
Yet the whole process is quite logical and consistent, so logical
that I am now working on a way to represent Chinese Medicine in
terms of computer logic, using AI as a basis.  The Chinese
language, especially medical Chinese, is in fact similar to
certain computer languages in its constant reiteration of
If/Then/Else Structures.

            Q.  And yet one frequently hear people
       describing Chinese as a totally chaotic language,
       that its characters are unwieldy and impossible to
       learn, that its word order and syntax are so loose
       and illogical that a single Chinese sentence  can be
       translated in several different ways.

     A.  That's exactly how many people experience Chinese,
especially if they don't get beyond a certain learning stage.
But this business of chaotic, illogical sentences, isn't this all
a bit familiar?  Haven't we heard this all before in another
context, isn't it just what the French say about English?  Let's
take the classic example of "a French teacher," which the French
quite correctly point out could mean either un maitre francais or
un maitre de francais.  Or the example that Vinay and Darbelnet
use,  un moteur de propulsion a jet, which we in English
hopelessly  distort by calling it a "jet propulsion motor," let
alone a "jet motor."  According to the French, we are suffering
from cumulative linguistic breakdown by omitting these vital
charnieres or hinge-words such as de and a.  But what the Chinese
would do is take the whole example one step further and express
"jet propulsion motor" in terms of their own language of course,
as something like jepromo.  They're even more speeded up than we
are.  And their language allows them to get away with it.  One
could in fact formulate the general equation that Chinese :
English = English : French.

            Q.  Then you're saying that Chinese in general,
       and especially Chinese medical language, is so much
       more speeded up than English that the translator has
       to slow it down and provide explanations in order to
       make things clear.  But don't other people in the
       field recognize this?

     A.  Unfortunately not.  Whether it's speeded up or simply
more concise, I'm not sure.  Everyone in translation is
accustomed to seeing a text in other languages shrink when it
turns into English.  But characters are intrinsically more
concise than words--they take up less room and also take less
time to say.  English shrinks when it goes into Chinese, Chinese
expands--sometimes double or triple--when it becomes English.
But not too many people want to admit or even hear this.  It has
to be linguistic chauvinism, though that's the last thing we need
in this field.  Chinese Medical Linguistics is so new that there
really are no experts yet, but one practitioner who knows some
Chinese recently generalized that "because Chinese has 5,000
characters and English has 20,000 words," anything expressed in
English is thereby far more valid than anything expressed in
Chinese.  His figures were totally mistaken, and the whole notion
is basically pretty shaky anyway, but this is typical of the
blundering and blustering going on among those
trying to build a bridge in this field on both the Chinese and
Western sides.  But the real relationship between the two
languages may end up being a bit less favorable to us.  Let's
suppose for a moment that the Chinese only had 3,OOO
characters...

            Q.  How many does it have?

     A.  That's a can of worms.  About the only thing people
agree on is that you need from 2,000 to 3,000 for basic literacy.
Beyond that we get into grounds for technical disputes--claims
run from 6,000 to 40,000, and even higher...But even with only
3,000, you have to remember a Chinese character is not the same
thing as a word.  Benjamin Whorf said it best and first--there is
no Chinese word for word.  A character can be anything from a
piece of a word, sometimes similar to a prefix or suffix, to an
unbound particle to a full unmistakable word on its own to a
free-standing abbreviation for a two-character phrase, which
might be either one word or two words in English, or even an
abbreviation for a four character construction (or "aphorism," as
they're sometimes known).  But let's just assume it's part of a
two-character phrase, by far the most frequent construction.
Here you have to visualize a table 3,000 characters across and
3,000 characters down, and wherever any of these pairs of
characters intersect, you have the possibility for something like
a word as we know it. That makes 9,000,000 possible slots for
words in Chinese.  Let's assume they put only 1% of those to
practical use, that still gives them the possibility of 90,000
words, with over eight million slots left potentially  free for
new meanings as they come along.

     This also explains how they have been able to swallow
western medical terminology whole--and numerous other western
technical vocabularies--with only a few predictable bouts of
indigestion.  But it also explains why we are still just nibbling
at the edges of Chinese Medicine in this country and possessed by
myriad preconceptions when we try to deal with it.  We may be
dealing with so vast a network of ideas that we are quite
literally unable to conceive of its scope or import.  Also, their
translations of western medical terms are much more transparent
than our originals...

            Q.  What do you mean by transparent?

     A.  By transparent and opaque mean how much we really
understand of the meaning and structure of our own language.  I
once overheard a nine year old Italian boy make the following
comment as his elder brother urinated in a gutter "Ma, che
inondazione!"  That is transparent--a nine year-old Italian can
know the word inondazione, because it is meaningfully related to
onda, wave. Virtually no nine-year old English speakers will know
the word "inundation" because it is a latin book word in our
language.  The equivalent anglicism, if it existed, would be
something like infloodment,or even infloodscape.  Chinese words
are transparent in this way, at least when read and often when
spoken as well.  Thus, the Chinese phrase for adrenal gland is
shenshangxian, kidney-atop-gland, quite similar to the Latin ad
renem, and hence means a lot more to the Chinese than even the
phrase "adrenal gland" does to most of us.  All of western
medical terminology is translated into Chinese this way--what it
loses in terms of "pure abstract conceptualizing" it gains in
everyday understanding.  Which is preferable?


            Q. Can you give some more examples?

     A.  Take the two bones in our lower arm.   The only names we
have for them today are ulna and radius.  These are the
"scientific  names," the ones medical people--and few others--
learn.  Those bones are important to you every day, yet you have
no everyday way of referring to them at all.  But there is clear
evidence from historical linguistics that these bones once had
other names.  The ulna was once called the "el", the radius
possible something like the "spoke."  We know about the "el" from
Sixteenth  Century poetry (maid to lover: ("if I give you an
inch, you'll soon take an el") but also from modern German, where
the words are die Elle and die Speiche.  Even in modern English
the place where the "el" makes a bend or "bow" (sich beugt) is
called the elbow.  In Chinese these words translate as foot-
measure bone (close to the meaning of "el") and rowing bone.  All
bones and all locations in the body have similar down-to earth
names in Chinese.  Which people are likely to be on better terms
with their bodies--one that has names such as these or one where
everything is linguistically off-limits except to doctors?
German continues to a better job here even today with such words
as Gehirnhautentzundung and Harnrohre for meningitis and urethra.


            Q.  Could you say something more about the four-
       character constructions.

     A.  That's at the very heart of the way the Chinese
systematize and store their knowledge.  They like to sum up a
whole subject  in just four characters, four syllables long,
which they then use as a mnemonic.  Dah-dah-dah-dah--it's like
half of Big Ben ringing.  If it's a truly difficult concept then
they will occasionally go for eight syllables, or full Big Ben.
It's very close to being like a computer macro, a brief series of
keystrokes to stand for something much longer.  And they can, if
need be, even macro-ize the four character phrase down to two
characters--or even one.  We have a few such structures even in
English.  Here's one: Spring Ahead Fall Behind.  It sums up a
specific procedure Americans go through twice each year when they
change from Standard Time to Day-light Savings Time and tells
them which way to move the clock's hands.  It's a fairly good
example of Chinese-like thinking in English.   Here's another:
"Blows Strokes Sweep Breaths."  I've left out the punctuation
because there wouldn't be any in Chinese.  There wouldn't even be
an `s' marking three of the words, because the Chinese don't
usually record the plural in nouns and verbs.  So let's try "Blow
Stroke Sweep Breath."  How would you translate that into another
language?   Would you imagine it as something poetic and
inspiring, such as "The vast wind beats on my heart, sweeping my
breath away?"  Or is it a tale or oarsmen being swept away while
pursuing a whale?  Or could it be something overtly sexual?
these are the sort of errors awaiting  anyone trying to translate
medical Chinese--and some have fallen into such traps.  The
precise meaning of the phrase Blows, Strokes, Sweep, Breaths
refers to a medical context in American English: it is a mnemonic
for remembering the correct order of actions in dealing with an
unconscious non-breathing patient and is taught in courses on
cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

            Q.  Can you give some examples of these four
       character summations as they occur in Chinese
       medicine?   Are they used frequently?

     A.  I can give lots of examples.  They're used almost
everywhere in Chinese medical texts, for diagnosis, treatment
procedures, theoretical explanations--and almost always in these
incredibly abbreviated forms that sound either bizarre or quaint
or poetic in translation.  That may be a good rule of thumb for
determining a bad translation in any context.  A translation may
possess a certain cultural distance from its original, but if it
sounds too quaint or bizarre or poetic, its likely to be a poor
one.  People in other societies do not normally go around being
quaint or poetic or bizarre--they wouldn't survive very long.
And the Chinese have not only survived--they have burgeoned and
flourished.  You want some examples--look at any text in the
medical literature, better yet look at these Chinese herbal pill
bottles.  There are hundreds like them--this one says
"Indications: Treatments of vulnerary (stricken or fallen),
shocken and twisten, septic burns and hemorrhagia per diaresin
(Tesuit's drops), etc."  Here's another:"Invigorating the spleen
and reinforcing the vital energy, relieving flatulence and
regulating the functions of stomach.  Used for asthenia of the
spleen and stomach...borborygmus, sticky stool."  Do I have to
tell you that's a bad translation?  This is the sort of thing
that might be published in the `Tickler File' of our ATA
newsletter, it's what the New Yorker used to print under the
heading `The Mysterious East."

            Q. You mean it doesn't sound like that in
       Chinese?

     A.  Not in the slightest.  It's positively beautiful in
Chinese.  Medical technical language to be sure, but concise,
incisive, elegant.  Almost entirely phrased in these four
character `aphorisms' (`slogans' might be closer) that Chinese
uses to make a long story very short.  We expect medical language
to sound Greco-Latinate and, well, medical.  But Chinese medical
language and thought, beyond the problems posed by the four-
character summaries, is much more geometrical, mathematical, even
legalistic in feel.  There is continual talk of confirmations, of
evidence, of methods of proof.  The language couldn't be more
empirical in tone, but almost all of this gets lost in the
translation.  It hasn't helped that one of the chief
`popularizing' books in the field mistranslates the term for
`evidence' pr `confirmation' as pattern.

            Q.  You mention a Chinese "medical literature--
       how extensive is it, and how much has survived?

      A.  Vast amounts have "survived."  We tend to think in
terms of Greek or Roman medicine, where we have allowed
innumerable volumes to be lost.  But the Chinese haven't made
this mistake.  With some exceptions, libraries were not allowed
to burn.  Consequently, a vast medical literature is still
central to Chinese culture, even with the advent of western
science.  One library in Peking claims over 50,000 volumes.  A
few hundred new books are published each year, and there are
several national and local journals.  Varieties of Chinese
medical language include ancient, modern, and a number of stages
in between, all with their peculiarities in vocabulary, as is
proper for an ongoing developing field of knowledge.  If we fail
to see this, it's only because of a disease I call "culture
blindness."

            Q.  Is Chinese Medicine antithetical to Western
       Medicine?  Or is there some way the two can be
       reconciled?

     A.  Of course they can be reconciled.  No intelligent
observer would suggest the contrary.  Western medicine has a more
sophisticated view of some problems, but the Chinese view can be
sophisticated in other ways.  But we have to go beyond the
unvoiced preconception on both sides, and to do this we have to
recognize that they exist.  We must become bimedical instead of
merely monomedical.  It's a task that linguists and translators
can perhaps do best, by really looking carefully at the original,
seeing what is actually there, and arriving at an accurate
version in western languages.  It represents an opportunity for
linguists and translators to show that their skills are not just
academic and parochial but can play an enormous part in a field
that is not merely practical but absolutely central to human life
and health.


                Copyright 1987 and 1995 by Alexander Gross
                            and Sandra Celt

                           This piece may be reproduced for
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