On WHO's standardisation of traditional Chinese medicine terms

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practice, research and education have proliferated globally since the 1970s, leading to a multiplicity of TCM translation activities. This calls for a standardised English translation schema for TCM terms as the absence of one allows for potentially dubious interpretations and multiple English variants corresponding to one TCM term. Various authoritative bodies have attempted to standardise TCM translations with the World Health Organisation (WHO) initiating one of the most significant movements to create a uniform nomenclature of English TCM terms in its 2007 publication entitled WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region. However, no study has been done before on the uptake of its proposed standardisations nor the effectiveness of its efforts. Resources and costs devoted to this subject matter cannot go down the drain. To take into account how well the standardised translations proposed by the WHO in its 2007 publication has been implemented, this study sets out to provide insights into expanding current efforts. Descriptive research design is used for this analysis and numerical data is collected through a web search. A general trend towards the adoption of terms from WHO’s publication is found and key factors affecting the uptake of WHO’s proposals include translation preferences in actual practice and the semantic clarity of the translation. Discrepancies among various standardisation efforts are observed which reflect that different authoritative bodies need to come together to push for one set of English TCM terms. Stronger implementation efforts are also required to accelerate the TCM translation standardisation movement.