Chinese-English Dictionary of Chinese Medical Terms

Book excerpt: Containing over 33,000 terms, the Chinese-English Dictionary of Chinese Medicine is the largest, fully searchable list of Chinese medical terms ever published. It is the only sufficiently comprehensive list of Chinese medical terms to be an ultimate go-to for any translator, student, or clinician. It contains a vast array of general terms, including the 5,000 or more of Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine (Paradigm Publications, 1997). It also contains the 1,500 standard and alternate acupoint names from Grasping the Wind (Paradigm Publications, 1989) and over 10,000 standard and alternate names of medicinals described in the Comprehensive Chinese Materia Medica (Paradigm Publications, 2023) derived from the Zhōng Yào Dà Cí Diǎn. The present e-book version offers maximum searchability without the need of indexes. Chinese terms are given in simplified and complex characters, so that they can be found by anyone who knows Chinese. Pinyin is given in accented and unaccented form, so that users can search by it whether they know the tones or have a system capable of entering tone marks. General terms can be searched by English, acupoints by alphanumeric codes, and medicinals can be searched by English and Latin pharmacognostic names. To make for the greatest utility without overly burdening the text, a standard set of graphical indicators are used throughout this and other related e-books. Square brackets ([ ]) indicate elements of terms that can be omitted (such as omissible elements of medicinal names) or notes to Chinese and English terms. A double asterisk (⁑) indicates polysemous medicinal names. A gray sidebar in the left-hand margin indicates a commonly used item. This dictionary has a history of over thirty years of continual expansion and refinement. It began with a database created while writing Fundamentals of Chinese Medicine (Paradigm Publications, 1985). It was published in the form of Glossary of Chinese Medical Terms (Paradigm Publications in 1990). It was expanded and republished in the form of the English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary of Chinese Medicine (Hunan Science and Technology Press, 1995). And in 2014, after further expansion, it was made available as the Online TCM Dictionary on Paradigm Publications’ website. These decades of development and publication have given the terms here presented the benefit of other scholars’ contributions, as well as the refinements inspired by public critique. Chinese-English Dictionary of Chinese Medicine is an invaluable asset for translators and teachers engaged in compiling or presenting information from primary sources. As a bilingual term list, it has met the critical test of actual translations of the classical Chinese medical texts, the Shāng Hán Lùn (Paradigm Publications, 1999) and Jīn Guì Yào Lüè (Paradigm Publications, 2013) Chinese Medicine: Theories of Modern Practice (Paradigm Publications, 2022) shows this terminology to be up to the challenge of presenting the entire theoretical knowledge of professional Chinese medical education. This e-book version offers translators suggestions for translation problems they come across in their work, without proprietary restrictions and at an extremely low cost. However, the notion that Chinese medicine does not possess a terminology that requires a corresponding terminology in English and other languages has not faded from the Western world. In view of this, the present work also includes an introduction explaining issues surrounding terminology and translation.