Study on international standard multilingual nomenclature of Chinese medicine

The International Standard Chinese-English Basic Nomenclature of Chinese medicine (ISN) was released in 2007, a nomenclature list consisting of 6 500 Chinese medical terms. ISN was the culmination of several years of collaborative diligent work of over 200 specialists who represent Chinese medicine in 68 countries. The overall goal for devising standard English nomenclature for Chinese medicine is to develop a practical international standard nomenclature for Chinese medical basic terms, to make it compatible with contemporary research and educational standards in the globalized health care service. In this article, provided is an overview of principles and methods for the multilingual translations, the processes behind the particular content of the Chinese-English ISN and an introduction to the ongoing new projects, i.e. the multilingual versions of ISN (International Standards of Chinese-Spanish, Chinese-French and Chinese-Portuguese Basic Nomenclature of Chinese Medicine).