Re: Not so fun! TCM Acupuncture Textbook is mistranslated

[Jordan Wiens <numatrix () ufl edu>]

On May 23, 2007, at 11:27 AM, Dave Paris wrote:

> This does not surprise me in the least.  I've been an advocate of  
> acupuncture since my first session 16 years ago.  I've been to  
> Korean, Chinese, and American practitioners.  (in NY, all must be  
> state licensed)
>
> I have /NEVER/ had a good experience with a Western-trained  
> practitioner.  At this point, I will only go to a multi-disciplined  
> Chinese practitioner - one with both formal medical training and  
> classic Eastern acupuncture training.  My current (and will be for  
> as long as he's in practice) is a Board Certified Orthopedic  
> Surgeon (and former head of the Orthopedic Department when he was a  
> surgeon in China) and has exceptional talent with acupuncture.  His  
> wife is also a formally trained herbologist - they make an  
> exceptional combination.  The Korean practitioner I went to was  
> trained in China and was rather good, but not as good as the one I  
> have now.
>
> The fact that there is a mistranslation is quite understandable.   
> Many of the Chinese medical texts are written in *classic* Chinese  
> (as would be written/spoken in Taiwan), and *not* the current  
> "simplified" Chinese that mainland China uses now.  As a medical  
> practitioner, my acupuncturist was required to take a *two year*  
> course on learning classic Chinese so he could fully understand the  
> material.  (ironically, we were just discussing this at my last  
> session)

Ehh?  Simplified versus traditional is not that hard of a leap to  
make.  They're not different languages, just different character  
sets.  The words themselves are the same no matter which is used to  
represent them.  I'm not sure that this has anything to do with  
mistranslations occurring.  Granted, I only took a year of  
traditional chinese here at the university, so I'm hardly an expert,  
but if somebody mis-translated the text, it's more likely they just  
plain didn't know the language all that well, and less that they were  
unfamiliar with traditional/simplified characters.

--
Jordan Wiens, CISSP
UF Network Security Engineer
(352)392-2061


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