The paradox of intertextuality and dilemmas in English translations of traditional Chinese medicine texts: terminology as a case study

Structuralists use the concept and methods of intertextuality to locate and fix literary meaning, yet poststructuralists employ the same term to disrupt notions of meaning, making it difficult to navigate through this paradox in textual and translation studies. When this term was incorporated into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) translation studies, the paradoxical meanings of the term were also adopted without resolving these paradoxes. This paper therefore focuses on the translation of a few key TCM terms, and attempts to clarify the following translation dilemmas that arise when attempting to apply the concept of intertextuality: 1) Intertextuality deconstructs clear and stable meanings and this leads to untranslatability; 2) It is impossible to reproduce the intertextual relations of the original; 3) The notion of equivalence in translation is therefore an illusion; 4) Translating becomes an intertextual practice itself, and the target text is just intertextually related to the source text. The paper probes into the potential usefulness and significance of intertextuality for TCM translation and finally proves that all dilemmas of translation can only be resolved through the very act of translating.