This work is a new contribution to the study of Chinese medicine discourse. Living translation refers to a dynamic process of translation drawing on anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, and translation studies. The author organizes the book according to the different phases of the translation process combining the above multiple disciplinary views. The book is noteworthy for dissecting translation activities—and understanding them as social processes in which translators search for resonance—in United States Chinese medicine.

In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the book comprises six chapters. The introduction centers on research background, participants, purposes, methodologies, and key concepts such as living translation and resonance. It ends with a clear illustration of the writing trajectory, including the principles underlying the use of ethnographic data. Chapter 1 presents a review of contemporary Chinese medicine in China and the United States in terms of historical and institutional translation practice. As for the enactment of Chinese-English translation, a careful analysis of two ethnographic vignettes helps readers better understand biomedical discrepancies in political, cultural, and institutional practices. Drawing upon interview data from students, teachers, authors, translators, and consumers of Chinese medicine collected in the United States, chapter 2 explores their divergent viewpoints concerning ideologies of language and translation in Chinese medicine. Chapter 3 provides a close examination of how the adherence to intertextuality and interdiscursivity contributes to the enactment of living translation. The social action of the translation of po consists of the ongoing complex interaction between translators themselves and their work in communities of practice, past and present, and future. Chapter 4 is organized around several classroom interactions in the translation process of Chinese medicine: focusing on evidential strategies, Pritzker probes the co-construction of translation practice between teacher and students, as they relate to multiple ideologies of language and translation. Chapter 5 provides a series of examples to illustrate students' embodied engagement, through which the meanings of terms and concepts in Chinese medicine are integrated across cultural and linguistic boundaries, and in which the body and the self become two major media for meaning transmission and language translation. Chapter 6 delineates how living translation embedded in the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is regarded as an engagement both with and for patients. In the conclusion, by using some related metaphors, Pritzker re-emphasizes the multifarious nature of living translation and transformation beyond the limitation of language.

In summary, this volume represents a valuable and concrete example of inter-disciplinary research involving anthropology, medicine, philosophy, and translation studies. It will serve as an excellent reference point for students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of translation and applied language studies.