One of more interesting exercises in terms of understanding the practical realities of the term debate is to read papers about individual topics. This is an interesting and educational way to compare loose translations and paraphrases to source-oriented works.

This is Eric Brand’s P.C.O.M. paper on Pathological Conditions of Common Gynaecological Diseases. If you compare Eric’s paper with commonly-used textbooks, you will see how pathomechanisms have been de-empathized.

A sample translation concerning cough: Diagnosis and Treatment of Cough. Note that the information comes from a single source text for higher education in the P.R.C.

This somewhat older paper discusses the translation of pulse terms: Pulse-taking Terminology.

Some insights to the eternal debate about vacuity and repletion: Xu1-Shi2.pdf

Readability in English Language Chinese Medical Texts responds to a commonly made critique that source-oriented writings are more difficult to read. Using professional readability software, this paper shows that this is not the case. It shows that simplification, not choosing familiar words, creates the perceived ease of reading. This articles will likely be strongly challenged, not only because it compares a popular text book, but also because it challenges a broadly-held idea. The raw files used in the readability comparison as well as the mythology are included so that you may do your own investigation.

In Wheezing Nigel Wiseman shows how clinical errors can remain unscrutinised when translators fail to provide comprehensive term lists and choose their English terms without appropriate research in the Chinese clinical literature.