Ju Yunsheng

Since the beginning of the pandemic of COVID-2019, the interaction between China and Russia in the field of medicine has become more relevant than before. Medical terminology is becoming more and more important as a means and medium of communication. Medical terminology was fully developed within the framework of the modern paradigm of linguistics, and its own discourse system has been built under the guidance of the general theory of terminology. In the Chinese scientific community of translators, there is scarce research into ways of translating Russian medical terms. Only by adhering to certain principles and methods is it possible to achieve a good communicative effect when translating medical terms from Russian into Chinese. This article starts with the classification of Russian medical terms and discusses the difficulties and strategies of translating them into Chinese, which has certain theoretical and practical guidance. It also presents a certain theoretical and practical guidance on the translation of medical terms from Russian into Chinese for special practices. This allows terminologists, lexicographers and translators to effectively engage in scientific and translation work.

The Russian terminology school is one of the three major terminology schools in the world. It has always been focusing on the research of terminology and the standardization of scientific and technological terms. Since the 1990s, Chinese scholars Zheng Shupu and his students have begun to introduce Russian terminology theory to China. Russian terminology has profound theories, many schools, and strong practicability, which is of great benefit to terminology studies in China. Terminology research has a long history in ancient China and involved various fi elds of ancient social life. Th e terminology community should be committed to digging out the origins, the formation and the development of Chinese terminology, revealing its development phase and characteristics, researching methods and outstanding achievements, reproducing the evolution history of terminology research, reproducing China’s unique state-of-the-art culture and terminology system, clarifying the important results of terminology research, etc.

This article examines the cognitive difficulties involved in translating Russian medical terms, including clinical terminology, into Chinese. The focus is placed not only on formal differences between the two languages but also on errors in interpreting term meanings, incomplete recognition of word-formation structures, misinterpretation of terminologized everyday words, abbreviations, and metaphorical models. The aim of the study is to identify the main types of cognitive difficulties arising in the translation of Russian medical terms into Chinese and to describe the mechanisms for overcoming them. 

The methodological framework combines cognitive and contrastive analysis with elements of translation studies and linguocultural analysis. The material includes Russian medical terms and stable terminological collocations used in scientific, educational, and clinical practice, as well as their Chinese equivalents. The paper examines four key groups of difficulties: interpretation of the word-formation structure of terms, terminologization of everyday words, translation of clinical abbreviations and diagnostic designations, and reconstruction of metaphorical models in the target language. 

The analysis shows that most translation errors are caused not by the absence of dictionary equivalents as such, but by a disruption in the relationship between the form of a term, its conceptual structure, and its professional context of use. It is demonstrated that an adequate translation of Russian medical terminology into Chinese requires not a literal reproduction of linguistic form but a conceptual reconstruction of meaning in accordance with the norms of Chinese medical nomination. The findings may be used in the training of medical translators, in the compilation of bilingual terminological dictionaries, and in further studies of Russian–Chinese professional communication.