Abstract
In order to explore the standard English translation of the core concept of traditional Chinese medicine, “Jing Luo”, this paper takes the three commonly used translations, namely “meridian”, “channel”, and “vessel”, as the research objects. By leveraging the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) corpus, this study conducts an empirical investigation on the usage frequency, stylistic distribution, and semantic characteristics of these three words. The research reveals that there are significant differences in the usage frequency of the three words in the corpus. “Channel” is a general and frequently used word with a wide range of stylistic coverage but relatively weak professional specificity; “vessel” is more often found in medical and maritime fields; “meridian”, although with a relatively low overall frequency, has strong stability and prominent specificity in academic texts, and is more in line with the expression requirements of traditional Chinese medicine terms. The study shows that the data from the corpus can objectively reflect the usage patterns of words in real contexts and can provide a reliable basis for the selection of English translations for traditional Chinese medicine terms such as “Jing Luo”, helping to improve the accuracy and standardization of the external dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine culture.
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How to cite this paper
A Comparative Study on the Translations of Medical Terms “Jing Luo” (Meridian) Based on COCA Corpus
How to cite this paper: Xifeng Zhan, Ping Li. (2025). A Comparative Study on the Translations of Medical Terms “Jing Luo” (Meridian) Based on COCA Corpus. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(5), 834-838.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.12.014