trevelyan on March 15, 2013 | reply

This is really awful Chinese. With condolences to your wife for having to even look at this document, I'd go with something like this, which is horrible english but I think captures the spirit of the original quite well:

General Application of the Quantitative Performance Assessment Law as regards both Individual and Small Groups of Nurses in Emergency Wards

murrayjames on March 15, 2013 | reply

Thanks David. I was disappointed I couldn't follow the Chinese, but I feel better now. Even the English, properly translated, is dense and incomprehensible.

My wife says she deals with this kind of writing all the time...

Brendan on March 15, 2013 | reply

Welcome to my life. The pro tip for translating something like 个人与小组制量化考核法在急诊科护士绩效评价中的综合应用 is to look for the 虚词 function words (in this case, 与, 在...中, 的) and figuring out the structure. General rule, once you find the 的 in something like this, it's just a matter of working backwards from there.

个人与小组制量化考核法在急诊科护士绩效评价中的综合应用.

Hoo boy.

As David says, 综合应用 means "General application" or something like that -- we can check the context in a bit to make sure that "general application" makes sense, but let's plug it in for now.

That gives us "个人与小组制量化考核法在急诊科护士绩效评价中的general application," and since we know that the bit before the 的 has to be modifying the bit after it, we can turn this into "General application [of] 个人与小组制量化考核法在急诊科护士绩效评价中."

The 在...中 simplifies this even further: "General application of 个人与小组制量化考核法 in 急诊科护士绩效评价". Now we're cooking with gas. All that's left to do now is beat on the big, 虚词-free chunks with dictionaries until they fall into smaller, more easily digestible pieces.

Besides "law," 法 also means "method," so I'd parse that 考核法 as "methods of assessment/evaluation." 量化 is "quantitative" or "quantified" or something along those lines, depending on the context. 绩效 is literally "achievements and efficacy," but really just means "performance record." So:

"General application of [ [individual][and][group][-structured][methods of quantitative assessment] ] in [ [ER] [nurse] [performance record] [evaluations] ]."

All downhill from here. "综合应用" looks like it's probably going to have to be plural in this context. How about something like "General applications for quantitative methods of individual and group assessment in the evaluation of ER nursing staff performance?"