This is a talk about “piracy,” the unauthorized use of intellectual property. What brought this about is an incident where someone used the field's dis

Acupedia

I originally planned this post as review of the A.A.A.O.M. Portland Conference term meetings and seminars with a concentration on the announcement of "Acupedia," a wikipedia-style web site that will present different term lists for comparison. I labeled the post "The End of the Term Debate" to emphasize that the presence of such a tool meant the end of two ideas that have long retarded the development of CM in the English-speaking world; that is, the notion that translation standards would lead to some never-defined but supposedly horrid outcome and the idea that terminology was about the selection of words rather than the preservation of ideas.

There has been considerable discussion and an unusual amount of press coverage covering the German studies of acupuncture and their conclusions. This links to an example article. This discussion is a good example of how long it takes for the medical establishment to pay attention to work done on acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Stephen Birch covered this issue in his Ph.D. thesis at Exeter University, and in Understanding Acupuncture, a text that has been used in medical schools for nearly a decade.

This is the last blog post in the "Term Chaos is Just Chaos" series, the previous posts are:

Part 1: Where the Infringement Hides

Part 2: Not Just a Matter of Words

Part 3: Standards Are Not Shallow

Those who have read the "Guided Tour to the Term Debate" essay on this site, understand that I see term chaos as just the latest step in a twenty-plus year attempt to justify paraphrase and simplification as the primary strategy for educating clinicians in the English-speaking world. The earliest assertion was that Chinese medicine had no terminology, an idea that I feel derived from a lay view of Chinese medical language and a certain embarrassment about Chinese medical ideas that expresses itself in the urge to biomedicalize and de-moralize. Later, as Wiseman and others consistently refuted this notion, anti-consistency arguments migrated, arriving today at "term chaos," which is itself a euphemism for an undocumented plurality that is supposed to be good, despite the lack of any orderly plan for how students are to be taught.

Part Three: Standards Are Not Shallow

At the A.A.O.M. nomenclature meeting Dr. Bensky and his colleagues made some very dramatic assertions. One of these was the assertion that standards are a detriment to seeking the "depth" of meaning in Chinese concepts. Notably, Dr. Bensky failed to describe "depth" in any understandable or practical, way. This is very much like his declaration that the long-standing consensual principals of translation Marnae Ergil described are "wrong." We're to take his word for it. Let's not do that. Let's think for ourselves.

The innumerable, often-forwarded emails and list service postings discussing the FDA Guidance on complementary and alternative medical products have slowed down, perhaps reaching a saturation

Part Two: Not Just a Matter of Words

The title of this blog is taken directly from Nigel Wiseman's paper "Translation of Chinese Medical Terms: Not Just a Matter of Words ."[1] I had two reasons to choose this title. First, the Bensky, Blalack, Chace and Mitchell paper entitled "Toward a Working Methodology for Translating Chinese Medicine" contains no actual methodology. Thus, it is important to show an actual working methodology, what it contains and how it is organized. Second, I want you to see that this speech for non-linguists, which has been freely available for nearly seven years, clearly shows that Bensky, et. al. characterize source-oriented translation in a highly prejudicial manner:

. . . the rigid application of the principle of one to one correspondence in translating Chinese terms into English easily oversimplifies Chinese medical ideas and tends to obscure the very interpretive nuances that make individual texts worth reading.[2]

People who have participated in CMN lists and forums know that our policy is to publish replies. As Steve Givens had not previously participated, I directly offered to post a reply, Here it is.

Part One: Where the Infringement Hides

I was anxious to move on to analyzing the arguments in favor of term chaos because I think they are all almost transparently weak. Yet, the more I thought about the idea that standards are an infringement the more I thought that this idea had to be further addressed. I kept coming back to the thought that of all the things anyone could have concentrated upon - openness, accuracy, database development and other field-enhancing investments to name a few- the idea most prominent in their minds was that term standards would be an infringement upon scholars in the field. What then could their idea of a term standard be other than a list of words that everyone must use? And, isn't a list of words that everyone "must use" the current reality?