The Google Method for Finding Chinese Drug Names

It’s a little bit tricky and there’s some shooting in the dark, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. Here’s what you do:

  1. Go to www.google.com
  2. Click on “Advanced Search“
  3. On the 5th line you’ll see “Language Return pages written in” and a little box that says “Any language.” Change that to be “Chinese (Simplified)”. I guess traditional characters would work too. I just always use the simplified ones.
  4. Now, on the first line in the topmost search box type your term (in this case “Albuterol”).
  5. Click “Search“

Here’s where it gets tricky. What you’ve done is asked Google to show you any pages that are written mostly in Chinese characters that also contain the English word “Albuterol.” What you’re looking for is a page that has the hanzi characters for Albuterol and then the English definition right afterwards, which might look something like this:

  沙丁胺醇(Albuterol)是一种非常有效的肾上腺素类β-激动剂

(this is on the 5th result page at the time of this writing)

If you don’t read hanzi characters, it will be difficult for you to tell the difference between bona fide medical information pages and spam and junk pages. So you might have to try these next steps several times.

  6. Grab that whole string of hanzi and dump it into a translator site that gives you the breakdown of each character, like the one here.
  7. If it feels right, copy the hanzi and pinyin to a text file or Word document for your reference later.

Ok, so how do you know if it “feels right?” Look at the translation of the hanzi above (click here to see it). See how it says:

  “shā dīng àn chún 沙丁胺醇 (Albuterol) is one type kind of extremely effective adrenaline.”

That’s good because that is in fact what Albuterol is (you might have to do a little learning about the drugs you’re looking for).