Point names in translation

Every classical point has a Chinese name of two or three characters, and many of the names say something about where the point is or what it was thought to do. The WHO standard fixes the Chinese characters and their pinyin spelling as the point’s standard name, alongside a code such as LI4, and fixes no English name. English renderings therefore vary from one book, and one database, to the next. This page shows how a name is built, what the WHO’s own explanations of the names say, and how far the English versions drift from the characters and from each other.

What the WHO standard fixes

The WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific published the second edition of its Standard Acupuncture Nomenclature in 1993. Its foreword records the problem it set out to solve: translations of Chinese texts had multiplied, spelling and pronunciation differed, and the same point had come to carry many names. Each of its 361 entries has three parts. The first is the standard name, made of three elements: an alphanumeric code, the pinyin name, and the Han (Chinese) characters, with the traditional form printed first and the simplified forms in brackets. The second is a short explanation of what the characters mean and why the point bears them. The third is a list of the names the point carried in American English, two British English traditions, French, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

The introduction is plain about what each element is for. The code helps international exchange but carries no therapeutic meaning and can mislead: under an older scheme H stood for heart in some sources and for liver (hepar) in others. The 1989 Geneva meeting, whose participants found the 1982 codes confusing and hard to remember, moved every channel to two capital letters. The characters carry a meaning the working group judged to defy translation, and pinyin lets a reader who does not read Chinese pronounce the name and find it in an alphabetical index. China’s national standard GB/T 12346-2021 follows the same pattern, printing each point as characters, pinyin with tone marks and code: 合谷 Hégǔ (LI4).

How a name is built

Each pinyin syllable spells one character, and the marks over the vowels are tone marks. The WHO entries print them, as in Hégǔ, and its explanations take the characters one at a time before saying what the whole refers to. The table sets some of those explanations beside the English that the WHO’s American list gave and the English name in AcuiQ’s catalogue.

The second paragraph of each WHO entry ties the name to the body. LI04 lies between the first and second metacarpal bones, in a dip like a valley. ST35 sits in one of the two depressions below the kneecap, which the entry compares to the nostrils of a calf. ST36 is on the leg 3 cun below the knee, and the entry reads the li in its name as a unit taken as the cun in ancient times, so the name states the distance. PC06 is at a site on the inner forearm the entry likens to a pass, and GV26 is in the philtrum, the groove of the upper lip, which the entry says looks like a water groove.

Where the translations part

The same characters reach English by different routes. The li of ST36 is a distance in the WHO explanation, a mile in the American list and in AcuiQ’s catalogue, and a village in the French list’s Troisième village. The guan of PC06 is a pass in the American list, a barrier in the French Barrière interne, and a gate in AcuiQ’s Inner Gate. The shen of GV24 is the mind in the WHO explanation, which says the name pictures the forehead as the vestibule of the brain; the American list made it God’s courtyard and AcuiQ’s catalogue Spirit Court. None of these is wrong in the sense a code can be wrong. Each picks one sense of a character that carries several.

The romanisations differ as well. The WHO multilingual lists give Hégǔ as Ho-Ku in the American and British lists, Gokoku in Japanese, Hapkok in Korean and Hợp cốc in Vietnamese, each the reading of the same two characters in that language; the American list spells ST36 Tsu-San-Li. The lists also record earlier codes: the French list numbers LI04 as 4GI and one British list as IG4.

One point, two names

Many points have more than one Chinese name, and the standard picks one. The WHO entry for GV26 gives Shuǐgōu as the standard name and records Rénzhōng as another name for it. The WHO location standard of 2008 and GB/T 12346-2021 both list the point as Shuigou. AcuiQ’s catalogue gives the pinyin rén zhōng and the English name Philtrum, so a paper that writes Renzhong, one that writes Shuigou and one that writes GV26 all mean the same point. Extra points carry the same problem with more force, since the WHO standardised only their names and codes; Extra points covers them.

English names as a teaching tool

Nigel Wiseman argued in a 2001 paper on English names for acupuncture points that the codes are the most efficient way for a student to learn the points, and that English names are still worth having because they open the tradition behind the names to a student who reads no Chinese. The paper sets out the semantic features of the names and the problems of translating them. Grasping the Wind, by Andrew Ellis and Nigel Wiseman, takes the same approach at book length. Its bookseller’s listing describes it as covering 363 points, giving for each the characters, pinyin, an English name, the classical location and alternate names, with a glossary of every character used in point names and an account of why each English name was chosen, so that readers can adapt the names.

Read as the WHO explanations read them, many names work as descriptions a student can check against the body: a valley between two bones, a calf’s nostrils beside the kneecap, three units below the knee. Others, such as Spirit Court, point to theory rather than anatomy, and the WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Medicine of 2007 defines the theoretical terms they draw on, such as qi, yin and yang and the zang-fu organs.

What a name cannot tell you

An English point name is not an identifier. Two books can give one point different English names and, less often, give two points similar ones, and nothing in an English name says which standard it came from. To carry a point from one source to another, carry the code and the pinyin with it. Reading a point code covers where AcuiQ’s codes differ from the WHO’s, and each AcuiQ point page prints the code, the pinyin with tone marks and the catalogue’s English name together. A name also says nothing about evidence: the WHO explanations record what the characters mean and what the tradition says of the point, not what any trial found.