Concept similarity and conceptual information alteration via English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation of medical article titles

This article investigated the phenomena of concept similarity and conceptual information alteration in medical translation as information transfer between English and Chinese. The purpose of this investigation was twofold: One was to explore conceptual information alteration through concept similarity in the translation of medical article titles between English and Chinese, and the other was to examine the reliability of inter-judge agreements on concept similarity for assessing conceptual information alteration via English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation of medical article titles. A research corpus of 100 article titles in English and Chinese were randomly selected from an existing collection of article titles obtained from two English medical journals and two Chinese medical journals. Findings were based on (1) the judges' pairing of concepts in both the original and translated titles, and (2) the judges' judgments on concept similarity of the paired concepts. Cohen's Kappa was used for determining the reliability of the judges' judgments. The results showed (1) the judges' ratings on concept similarity of the paired concepts were substantially reliable; (2) the loss of conceptual information was much greater than the gain in both English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation; and (3) there were two kinds of conceptual information alteration: One was apparent and the other latent. The results are also applicable to cross-language information retrieval on parallel corpora between different languages as well as between English and Chinese. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.