The metaphor of traditional Chinese medicine in TCM classic Yellow Emperor's Canon of Medicine

—Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is extensive and profound, characterized by well-developed and abstract theoretical framework. The first preserved medical canon in China, Yellow Emperor's Canon of Medicine, records the advancements in Chinese medicine. The knowledge system and theoretical foundations can be learned through the analysis of TCM classics. It can be found that the classic applies many metaphors to construct the semantics of the terminological system. Metaphor maps the source and target domains and is essential for human conceptualization, bridging the gap between the linguistic and medicinal realms. This qualitative study takes the metaphors in Yellow Emperor's Canon of Medicine as the research object and utilizes the conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (2008) and the Metaphor Identification Procedure by Group (2007) to determine conceptual metaphors. The results revealed that the metaphor of battling an army can be used to describe a patient's struggle with illness to simplify complex biological processes and inspire resilience, and human organs can be manifested as officials to emphasize specialization and coordination within the biological system. Additionally, the functions of metaphor in meaning construction and the translation strategies employed in metaphor translation are summarized. The ways of translating metaphors include reproducing the same image, replacing the metaphor with another image, converting it to the sense, and transferring it into a simile. This study identifies various metaphorical expressions related to TCM and summarizes effective translation strategies, offering new insights into TCM translation.

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