The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Maybe in the VMS the "main uses" keyword is often omitted, because it is superfluous. Note that the shortest SBJ recipe omits that keyword altogether.  After all, the first 主治 serves only to separate the list of diseases from the "taste and flavor" field; if that field is present in an SBJ recipe but is omitted in the SPS version (as it was in the Rooster case), the translation of the following 主治 could have been omitted too.

Two issues here! 

First, this is begging the question. The appearance that "keywords" have been omitted depends on seeing the correspondence in the first place. The need for an explanation here and the fact it is speculative goes to the weakness of the correspondence.

Second, and insofar as we take it to be antecedent to the claim, it is also dubious on its own merits. The source language, literary Chinese, is famously very terse; if the verb, 治, could be omitted it would not appear in the original. It does not only serve to separate the uses from the properties, but carries important grammatical information, namely establishing the new topic as "principle uses". In your example, omitting the "principle indication" pair 主治 shifts the topic to women and children 女子, and the rest of the clause becomes a comment on them, namely that they collapse from discharge 崩中漏下, or something like that. (I will defer to someone more practiced with Classical Chinese if they say I've missed some nuance, but what matters here is that the sentence is no longer about *treating* them, but the fact that the disease happens to women and children.) Broadly, this is going to be an issue in any isolating language in the area. The terseness of the original and the fact that topic-comment works this way in most of the potential target languages as well means that it would be surprising if the topic were omittable.