1 Translation of Common Names of Drugs
First of all, it needs to be clear that the names of drugs generally include generic names (generic names or non-generic names) and trade names (trade names or trade names) of drugs. According to the relevant regulations of drug administration in China, the use of drug names requires the approval of National Medical Products Administration. The names of drugs here include their generic names and trade names. Drug trade names usually do not need to be translated, so this paper only discusses the generic names of drugs.
according to
In order to avoid confusing patients and even doctors with more than one drug, it is necessary to have a unified drug name. Therefore, the National Pharmacopoeia Committee has formulated a special naming principle for drugs and stipulated a consistent generic name for drugs. Once this generic name is approved by the national health administrative department to be included in the drug standard, it will become the legal name of the drug.
Therefore, the legal names of drugs should be unique, and translation by legal names is preferred: but in reality, due to translation or habit factors, some drugs have different customary names among consumers and doctors, so many drugs have two legal names, such as acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), dipyridamole (dipyridamole) and vitamin E (anti-tocopherol); In practice, it often happens that pharmaceutical compounds are not approved for listing in China, so there is no legal name, but there may be different translations given by several development agencies or included in some dictionaries. In the latter two cases, the translator needs to select and determine the best translation and indicate the original text if necessary.
Translation principle
Knowing the naming rules of drug generic names can better translate drug generic names. For example, the generic names of APIs and preparations are generally composed of multiple affixes, and the Chinese translation names should also correspond to the English names as much as possible. Transliteration, free translation or phonological translation can be adopted, mainly transliteration. Transliteration is the translation of English drug names into the same or similar Chinese. Such as tamoxifen, ritalin, ritalin, chlorpromazine: when there are many syllables, abbreviation can also be used, such as amitriptyline amitriptyline. Free translation is to translate into Chinese according to the meaning expressed in the name of the medicine, such as cholic acid, tetracycline and tetracycline. Semantic parataxis translation refers to transliteration of one part of drug names and free translation of the other part, neostimine (neo-new) and midecamycin (-mycinomycin). Drugs that form salts or esters with acids should be translated into "acid esters" or "acid salts", such as rosiglitazone maleate and quaternary ammonium salts. Generally chlorine and bromine are placed in front of ammonium, such as benzalkonium bromide. Except for those that have been used for a long time, try not to chlorinate chlorine and bromine. Naming of bromide: for the naming of optical isomers, left or right is usually used before the name; For acidic salts, use "hydrogen", such as sodium bicarbonate, instead of "heavy".
It should be noted that in order to freely translate and transliterate drug names quickly and accurately, translators need to accumulate a considerable number of stems, especially those of international common names (INN) published by the World Health Organization (WHO), such as-abitabine,-statin,-amivir,-acetaminophen,-mycin-mycin and-statin.
Translation of pharmaceutical chemical names
Compared with common names, the translation of chemical names, especially system names, is often much more complicated, because it often involves the classification and naming rules of various compounds and groups. For some compounds with complex structures, translators often need good knowledge of organic chemistry to deal with them.
The vast majority of pharmaceutical ingredients in PCT patent applications are compounds, including synthetic and extracted compounds. Except for a small part of chemical names, which can be common names or common names, the rest are basically new compounds, and there is no recognized common name. Therefore, their structures can only be represented by system names. In the research and development stage, on the basis of system naming, it is often represented by the code or number given by the pharmaceutical company that developed it. However, in any case, systematic naming always represents the most basic and accurate way of compounds.
Naming principle
There are some basic rules for the systematic naming of compounds. The most important is the IUPAC nomenclature promulgated by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which has two versions (1979 and 1993) (the website of tetracarboxylic acid butane tetracarboxylic acid (mistranslation: tetracarboxylic acid, note that the former has 8 carbon atoms and the latter has 4 carbon atoms); Poly (carboxylic acid) polyacid (mistranslation: poly carboxylic acid), silicon (silicon) and siljca (silicon dioxide): aluminum (aluminum) and alumira (alumina), malic acid (malic acid) and maleic acid (maleic acid); Chitin (chitin) and chitosan (chitosan): carboxyl {carboxyl} and carbonyl (carbonyl); Nucleotide (nucleotide) and nucleoside (nucleoside); OXO (oxo, instead of hydrogen atom) and oxa (oxo, instead of carbon atom) and so on.
There are many similar situations, so I won't list them here. We need to sum up and accumulate them in our daily translation work to continuously improve the quality and level of translation.