Abstract:

Western medicine terms are professional terms which mostly originated in foreign languages and mainly got into Chinese vocabulary system through transliteration. The characteristics of Chinese, especially the semantic features of Chinese characters, determine that the transliteration of Western medicine terms involves not only phonetic correspondence, different models of transliteration, and the selected Chinese characters play vital roles as well. This paper examines the existing problems on the basis of a discussion about the models of transliteration and the selected Chinese characters of the terms. The data are from the Chinese-English Medical Dictionary published by People’s Medical Publishing House. Moreover, some suggestions are given for the normalization of western medicine terms.

Key words: western medicine terms, models of transliteration, selected Chinese characters