No abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a very ancient history and its importance for human health has long been acknowledged worldwide. The significant role that TCM plays in the global healthcare system has been officially recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), which devoted a chapter to TCM in the 2019 latest version of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11). TCM, alone or in combination with Western Medicine (WM), has been recommended for various health conditions (Aung et al., 2013; Cai et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2015) – including mild COVID-19-related symptoms (Zhao et al. 2021). As a result of globalization, which has fostered the spread of TCM in the Western world, and the prominent role of English as the language of international communication, there has been an ever-increasing need for translation and higher levels of accuracy and standardization in the English terminology related to Chinese medical concepts. This issue has raised several debates over time among linguists, translators, and physicians as to the approach to be adopted for the English translation of Chinese medical terms. If on the one hand, a source-oriented strategy tends to preserve the original meaning and to convey concepts as closely as possible to the original language, on the other hand, a target-oriented method attempts to render those concepts more accessible to the target language, albeit the integrity of their true meaning is likely to be undermined. This paper intends to highlight the major questions that the translation of culture-bound terms poses when different cultures are involved. In this respect, two important works were analyzed and compared, namely A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine (1998), and the International Standard Chinese-English Basic Nomenclature of Chinese Medicine (2008). Both works testify to the difficulty of carrying out advanced projects of standardization of Chinese-English nomenclature of medical terms in the joint effort to create a common reference language.

Health is a common issue for all human beings. As a consequence, everyone in the world has in some way to cope with the language of medicine. This is true now more than ever due to the global health crisis caused by the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has introduced a great amount of terms, previously mostly used by epidemiologists and statisticians, but which now have entered the daily lexicon of many languages. As the medium of international scientific communication, English is the language of worldwide information about the pandemic, and the main source of terms and expressions for other languages. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on English lexicon has been so deep that the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED) released special updates in 2020 to fulfil the need to document the phenomenon. However, previous studies (Khan et al. 2020; Deang and Salazar 2021) have highlighted the important question concerning the existence of several ethnic minorities who have Limited English Proficiency (LEP) and therefore do not receive sufficient and appropriate information to defend themselves adequately against SARS-CoV-2, the virus we have all been fighting for more than one year now. The aim of this study is to highlight the importance of language and translation as essential components to provide all demographic groups/communities with access to COVID-19-related information in languages other than English and enable them to follow official health key rules. The main websites of Italian governmental and nongovernmental institutions were investigated, and the analysis focused on the availability and type of content of the multilingual material, as well as on information accessibility and clarity. The results showed important differences in the number of available languages and, even more, in the level of intelligibility of COVID-19 material in the English language. In this respect, this study intends to foster the use of plain English in the dissemination material provided by the websites of the main healthcare public institutions in Italy, a country with an ever-increasing number of registered foreigners, the majority born in non-EU countries.