ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several key challenges facing translators of Chinese medicine, including ideologies of the body, shifting cultural contexts, and the political implications of power as enacted in and through translation. Throughout the chapter, the overall emphasis is on the translation of Chinese medicine as it emerges in everyday interaction across a range of different sites, including both texts and spoken conversations. The notion of ‘living translation’ is thus introduced as a framework for understanding the translation of Chinese medicine as extending far beyond the transfer of meaning. Inclusive of the ongoing interactive, embodied, experiential, and practical processes comprising translation in Chinese medicine, living translation thus offers an anthropological perspective on the ways in which multiple, often divergent, translations not only co-exist but together give rise to the translation of Chinese medicine into practice in the contemporary US.
