Customer Reviews

A Chinese-English Dictionary of Medical & Health

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As an english speaking practitioner of chinese medicine, I translate medical journal articles from Chinese to English for publication in the western world. Because my vocabulary is limited and medical vocabulary is quite specialized for each medical specialty, I have a great need for good dictionaries, and without a good medical dictionary, translation is almost impossible. I was excited to finally own my own medical dictionary after borrowing someone elses for quite a while, and unfortunately I bought this one sight unseen. If you are like me and have a limited vocabulary in Chinese DO NOT buy this book! The first clue should be that the introductory material and the page titled "how to use this book" is all in chinese except the title. If you are familar with Chinese you will know that the language is written in symbols or characters, but sometimes is also written using the english alphabet using one of several standardized systems based on the actual pronunciation of the Chinese word the character stands for. This allows standard Chinese-English dictionaries to alphabetize the characters in a listing. This particular dictionary is set up in a very awkward way. Indeed, in each section the characters are in alphabetical order, but one would never know this unless one knew the pronunciation of all of the characters listed, because ONLY the character symbols are given (albeit in alphabetical order) but without the anglicized version using the english alphabet and without even a mere and much hoped for indication of where the breaks are between letters of the alphabet. So, to find a phrase you must thumb through dozens and dozens of pages until you recognize a character you do know so you can figure out whether you are currently in the "J" section of the "R" section or just where you actually are. Then you must jump ahead or back some estimated amount to where you think the alphabetic letter you need might be, find another character you recognize and determine if you have jumped too far or not far enough. Once you finally narrow in on the correct letter of the alphabet, then you must simply start scanning through pages of entries until you stumble across the symbol you need. Even worse, the dictionary is broken up into topics, so if you do not find the phrase in one place, then you must start the process over in each section that might be relevant. For instance, I recently translated a clinical research paper on treating tension headache with the herb Tian Ma, which affects the nervous system biochemically and alters blood flow in the brain. This was my first translation of a paper on headaches so there were a number of new confusing phrases. Unfortunately to find them in this book I would have to repeat my awkward search in the physiology section, the biochemistry section and the neurolgy section because all applied to most of the terms. Each phrase then could require up to 30 minutes of scanning and searching. It is quite clear from the design of this book that it was only intended for a medical practitioner fluent in Chinese who wishes to know how something might be said by an English speaker. The book simply does not work for the English speaker wishing to know what a chinese phrase says in her own language. Imagine trying to use an english dictionary if one had not yet memorized the English alphabet and were dyslexic on top of that. That is how I felt trying to use this book. I knew the information was there, but even though I knew the character, its standard translation and its pronunciation, the only way to find it was just to scan pages and pages hoping to recognize the character in the listings. Worst of all, because the book was shipped on a free 2-day upgrade, I will now have to pay for this upgrade and pay the return shipping on the book, meaning I lost about half what I paid for the book. I thought about just keeping it, but frankly it is just unuseable until I reach an expert level in reading Chinese.