Epistemic stance in the translations of Chinese medicine classics: a case study of Huang Di Nei Jing

Yan Yue*, Canzhong Wu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
113 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This article is a contrastive study of epistemic stance in the English translations of the Chinese medical classic Huang Di Nei Jing by clinicians and non-clinicians. Epistemic stance is concerned with a translator's certainty about the proposition of a statement and is highly consequential to information validity. By drawing on the systemic functional linguistic framework and using two sets of translations of the Chinese medicine classic, Huang Di Nei Jing, by both clinicians and non-clinicians, the study investigates the linguistic choices concerning epistemic stance. The findings show that epistemic stance is closely related to the translators' domain knowledge and expertise, with clinician-translators more likely to express their epistemic stance in the translations. However, this study also finds a counterintuitive epistemic pattern: Non-clinician translators express more certainty in their translations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)279-302
Number of pages24
JournalText and Talk
Volume42
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Mar 2022

Bibliographical note

Copyright de Gruyter 2021. Article originally published in Text & Talk, vol. 42, no. 2, 2022, pp. 279-302. The original article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0025. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.


Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

Keywords

  • domain knowledge
  • epistemic stance
  • medical translation
  • systemic functional linguistics
  • traditional Chinese medicine

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