An Empirical Corpus Study on Word-Formation and Translation Strategies in Chinese Medicinal Nomenclature

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_119How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Chinese medicinal names; corpus; translation strategy

Abstract

This multidisciplinary study integrates linguistics, TCM, and computer science to explore the relationship between word-formation patterns and translation strategies of Chinese medicinal names. A large-scale, high-quality Chinese-English parallel corpus was constructed. Chinese medicinal names were classified by morphological types, and their English translations by strategy. Statistical analyses including chi-square tests and correspondence analysis were conducted. Results show that word-formation significantly influences translation strategy selection (p < 0.01). Part-based names tend to use Latin names (with plant parts) or literal translation; efficacy-based names prefer Pinyin + generic term or Latin names; compound names mainly adopt Pinyin + annotation. An evidence-based translation decision-making model is proposed. Word-formation is critical in predicting and determining translation strategy selection.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiaoqing Hu
AU  - Dechun Lu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - An Empirical Corpus Study on Word-Formation and Translation Strategies in Chinese Medicinal Nomenclature
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 12th International Conference on Digital Humanities and Frontiers in Social Sciences (DHFSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1116
EP  - 1122
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_119
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_119
ID  - Hu2026
ER  -