3/23/2014

Japanese-English glossary

Three years ago I posted the below text on an acupuncture forum (http://acmac.net/forum/), where it has been viewed about 300 times ... although nobody is responding ...

Maybe it can be seen from my profile, that I am apart from being a (German) acupuncturist practicing for 30 years in Japan also a translator.

During my translation work, I occasionally also get work related to oriental medicine. Here comes the problem then.
To the best of my knowledge (I did a rather extensive search), there is only one VERY little Japanese-English Dictionary of oriental medicine.

So, during translation work I do rely on several "standard" Chinese-English dictionaries and other source. If I find something that suits the context, as well as my interpretation of the matter, I note that term in a spread sheet. Including items like:
-> Chinese characters / Japanese reading in Kana / romanized Japanese reading / English translation / alternative translation / romanized Chinese reading / links (if any) / pictures (if any) / comments / discussion.
(I am thinking of adding German translations too)

My question / request:
Are there any people on this list that speak/write Japanese, who might be willing to help me by contributing a few possible terms?


Wordwide everybody tends to believe that Chinese acupuncture (or oriental medicine in a wider sense) is the one and only "authentic" branch in this field of knowledge. However, it is common knowledge and need not to be detailed here, that in China EVERY piece of information is censored. There is absolutely no reason to assume, that oriental medicine is an exception.
If the world then has access to only one (permissible) interpretation, it very much restricts its horizon.
Here in Japan nobody (I mean of people in power and with influence) really gives a "r**ts a**" about oriental medicine. That precisely provides for real freedom of speech. And given the fact, that there is a 1500-year history of oriental medicine here, the Japanese have quit a bit to say, that differs from the Chinese points of view.
Even with basic concepts like yin and yang, I am always under the impression, that interpretations vary. Therefore the use of Chinese-English dictionaries does not provide satisfactory results when translating Japanese material.

* Material: the Japanese have a funny way of collecting all sorts of "material". To the best of my knowledge (again), the largest collection of Buddhist sripts is found in Japan, the largest character dictionary of the world has been edited by a Japanese and is standard issue in every library. I would have to check, how these superlatives read in correlation to classic oriental medical scripts, but I would not be surprised, if they have here a larger collection .....
And if they do, you could be rather sure, that those not replicas modified to suit communist party guidelines.

I would like to help make some of these materials available to the world. The Japanese themselves are apparently not very keen to do so.
And if anybody could help me out with hints at possible translation (I can provide the file I made so far), this could be a first step.
I also have a lot of fancy ideas (dreams) about other = further aspects, but maybe I should not get ahead of myself.

Thank you.
Thomas Blasejewicz


No comments:

Post a Comment