移植

• Pinyin: yí zhí
• Hanzi breakdown: 移 = 禾 + 多 (grain + many — moving, transferring); 植 = 木 + 直 (tree/wood + straight — to plant upright)

Meaning

To transplant; to graft. In medicine: organ or tissue transplant. In botany: transplanting seedlings. In technology/culture: transplanting or porting something from one context to another.

A versatile verb covering medical transplantation (器官移植, 骨髓移植), agricultural transplanting (移植秧苗), and metaphorical use for adapting systems, models, or cultural practices from one context to another. The metaphorical use is common in academic and policy discourse.

Examples

1. 手术团队经过十四小时的奋战，成功完成了省内首例心脏与肝脏联合移植手术，患者目前生命体征平稳。 After fourteen hours of nonstop work, the surgical team successfully completed the province’s first combined heart-and-liver transplant, and the patient’s vital signs are now stable.
2. 农技推广员指导村民将育秧盘中的水稻秧苗按行距移植到稻田中，确保株距均匀以利于通风与采光。 The agricultural extension worker showed villagers how to transplant rice seedlings from nursery trays into the paddy in orderly rows, keeping spacing even to improve airflow and sunlight.
3. 研究者警告，将发达国家的监管框架直接移植到新兴市场，往往会因制度环境差异而产生意想不到的负面效果。 Researchers warn that directly transplanting a regulatory framework from developed countries into emerging markets often produces unexpected negative effects due to differences in institutional environments.

Usage Guide

Context: medicine, agriculture, technology, policy

Tone: neutral

Do Say

• 中心建立捐献登记和配型系统后，等待肾脏移植的患者平均等待期缩短到两年内。(After the center set up donor registration and matching systems, the average wait for patients needing a kidney transplant was shortened to under two years.)
• 软件开发团队在完成核心算法的移植工作后，还须针对目标平台的硬件特性对渲染引擎进行深度优化，方能确保移植版本的运行性能达到原版水准。(After completing the transplanting of the core algorithm, the software development team must also deeply optimise the rendering engine for the hardware characteristics of the target platform to ensure that the ported version achieves performance levels comparable to the original.)

Don't Say

• 把文件移植到新电脑 — 移植 implies transplanting something organic or systemic; for ordinary file transfers use 复制、迁移、转移; 移植 in computing specifically refers to porting software/systems

Origin & History

移 (to move/transfer) + 植 (to plant/implant — 木 wood/tree + 直 straight, suggesting a plant set upright in the ground)

Cultural Context

Era: Modern

Generation: All ages

Social background: Universal