
Translating and Interpreting Chinese Philosophy - bookofjoe
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-translate-interpret/
======
dwohnitmok
An important point that I think this article leaves out is the relationship of
Classical Chinese to modern Chinese.

Often I've found that translating Classical Chinese into modern Chinese is
easier than translating Classical Chinese into modern English.

It gives three English translations of a poem from the Book of Odes (Shijing
诗经), namely the "Cock's Crow" (not sure if there's a standard English
translation of the title, 鸡鸣). It mentions that there is no definite mention
of the speaker and different translators make different choices (it
incidentally leaves out the other point of ambiguity in that section which is
whether to translate 朝 as "court" or "dawn", which you see in Legge's and
Pound's choices of "the court is full" and "crowding the hall" vs Waley's
choice of "full daylight" but this is a more ordinary single-word-has-
multiple-meanings problem).

Yet if you look at a modern Chinese translation of the poem, e.g. one found on
the Baidu encyclopedia
([https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%9B%BD%E9%A3%8E%C2%B7%E9%BD%...](https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%9B%BD%E9%A3%8E%C2%B7%E9%BD%90%E9%A3%8E%C2%B7%E9%B8%A1%E9%B8%A3/1806628?fromtitle=%E9%B8%A1%E9%B8%A3&fromid=12002905)),
the same "ambiguity" persists! There is no explicit speaker.

The relationship between modern Chinese (including its various varieties) and
Classical Chinese is a far more complex one than the relationship between say
Latin and the Romance languages. At times it is useful to think of Classical
Chinese as an entirely separate language from modern Chinese. At times it is
more useful to think of it as an extremely elevated register of modern
Chinese. A modern Chinese work can be successively "Classical"-ified. For
example there is a rough ordering of informal, spoken language -> informal,
written language -> popular nonfiction -> modern academic articles (about the
humanities) -> full-on Classical Chinese where each stage uses increasingly
more "Classical Chinese"-isms than the previous one. Pronouns used change; a
weird bimodal distribution of monosyllabic words occurs where the informal
spoken language has a lot of monosyllabic words, full-on Classical Chinese has
a lot of monosyllabic words, but everything in the middle tends to have a lot
more bisyllabic words; sentence structures also change.

There isn't really an analogous, somewhat smooth transition of say a French
work into a Latin work.

Even within Classical Chinese you have different gradations of how "Classical"
it is. Early Christian missionaries to China distinguished between "deep"
Classical Chinese and "shallow" Classical Chinese and produced different
translations of the Bible written in each style.

This carries over to the ambiguity in the sentences. Different Classical
Chinese works can have very different amounts of ambiguity, even in the same
genre. The Records of the Grand Historian, a Western Han dynasty historical
record is written in a fairly plain style. In contrast, the Book of Han, an
Eastern Han dynasty historical record is at times infamously impenetrable
(even to ancient readers), where single sentences have spawned whole
commentaries.

So through the lens of Classical Chinese as a very elevated register of modern
Chinese, I would contend that a portion of the difficulties in translating
Classical Chinese are inherent in differences between Sinitic and Indo-
European languages, which are only exacerbated by the extreme concision of
Classical Chinese.

That is, to a limited degree, I would say the reason that aren't articles
about "translating Classical Greek" or "translating Sanskrit" is that those
all are still languages from the same language family whereas Classical
Chinese is entirely different. The article alludes to this, but seems to
single out Classical Chinese as special. A fun exercise to explore this idea
which is unfortunately beyond my expertise would be to examine the process of
translating ancient Egyptian or Classical Arabic to see if it is at all
similar.

Another factor in difficulty of translation, returning to the idea of
register, is that different grammatical constructions, even if they appear in
both languages, can only be appropriately used in wildly different registers.
English also has, to a limited degree, the flexibility of grammatical
categories that Classical Chinese has. "Beer me!" says the guy at a party to
no one in particular, which the host obliges by handing him a beer. Beer, a
noun, has been pressed into service as a verb, and subject of the command is
the vague, unsaid "Someone". Indeed, if you were so inclined, you could call
this "verbing a noun." However, this is extremely informal in English, whereas
in Chinese this is extremely formal.

Finally, despite all this, I agree with the article that ambiguity plays a
part in Classical Chinese that isn't often found in English or potentially
even modern Chinese. Sometimes the difficulty is in disambiguating a given
passage. Sometimes, however, the difficulty is often NOT in trying to
disambiguate the Classical Chinese, but how to represent that ambiguity
faithfully in the target language.

As a minor example, English has a word "lobster." Spanish doesn't (as far as I
know)! It has two different words for different organisms that would both fall
under the category of "lobster" (langosta, Spiny Lobster, and bogavante,
Clawed Lobster). So, how do you translate "lobster" into Spanish? "Lobster" in
English intentionally means both langosta and bogavante! There is an ambiguity
in the English word "lobster" that Spanish simply doesn't have, which you lose
if you choose either "langosta" or "bogavante".

Similarly, the lack of a subject in a lot of both Classical and modern Chinese
sentences lends the text an intrinsic ambiguity that is essential to its
meaning. The article obliquely acknowledges this in its conclusion which
mentions getting away from "clarity and precision."

That was long and convoluted and I'll stop here. I'll just end with one small
unrelated observation. The article also glosses over some interesting
controversies surrounding Classical Chinese by viewing Classical Chinese as a
purely written artifact.

Did Classical Chinese ever represent an archaic spoken version of Chinese (say
Old Chinese of the Warring States Period or earlier)? Or has it always been an
artificial, idealized, written language? In a related vein do the rhyme
dictionaries of Middle Chinese represent an actual spoken pronunciation or are
rather a handbook for an artificial and formal pronunciation of Classical
Chinese works? Different academics have different views.

------
La-ang
My synopsis: The only way to understand text is to learn the original
language. When I compared Arabic text with translated versions for example,
although done by supposedly professionals, I couldn't help but sense awkward
misalignments in context. Perhaps the interpretation (understanding) of both
reader and writer differ, and so does the translation. The transcending
misunderstanding can not be rectified unless a glance is made at the original.
I know learning another language just to read a book is indeed way too much,
but it is worth it, for you will not be reading one book eventually, and
learning a language like Mandarin in this instance is an exciting experience.
Examples of books I've read in original language and translation include
Political Ideals by B. Russell, 100 years of solitude By G. Marquez, Spirits
Rebellious By Khalil Gibran. I am also learning Mandarin, but rest assured, I
still need another 5 years to be able to read and write decently.

~~~
tasogare
> My synopsis: The only way to understand text is to learn the original
> language.

Exactly my approach too, hence why I learn Sumerian for instance. Also note
that we are speaking of Chinese philosophy here so the language to learn is
Classical Chinese, not Mandarin. Few people would jump into that without at
least some knowledge of a modern Chinese language, but it can be done (notably
by reading Pulleyblank book).

~~~
La-ang
Yes indeed, although I assume that since Mandarin is more accessible for
learners, it can serve as a 101 to classical. Quote: [None of what has been
said up to this point is to suggest that studying Chinese language and early
thought is only for the classically curious and linguistically intrepid].

~~~
derefr
I would be curious whether it'd be easier to learn Classical Chinese and then
Mandarin, rather than the other way 'round. Seems like, if you take the
"forward" approach, you get to reinforce your language learning with a
complementary narrative of cultural evolution, where the two bodies of
knowledge can reinforce one-another.

~~~
lnanek2
That does sort of happen to those of us who need learn both traditional and
simplified. If you learn traditional, you have a better chance of being able
to read simplified with a little more effort than the other way around.

~~~
dwohnitmok
Eh... I feel like I hear claims of both directions. The Chinese internet is
full of people claiming that Taiwanese people can't read simplified Chinese or
that PRC people can't read traditional Chinese.

FWIW, anecdotally every mainland Chinese person I've met has been able to read
traditional characters. For some of them it is, however, more laborious. All
of them have been able to read long tracts in traditional Chinese (think the
length of a newspaper article or longer), although sometimes it takes obvious
effort. This has not been true of some Taiwanese people I've met for
simplified characters.

I'm mostly tempted to chalk this up to environmental factors rather than
reasons intrinsic to the script. The mainland often gets a lot of Taiwanese
cultural imports, while I don't think Taiwan gets as much cultural imports
from the mainland. Furthermore there is a lot of stylistic usage of
traditional characters in the mainland (posters, store signs, branding,
calligraphy, artwork) and university-level Classical Chinese language classes
(aimed at domestic students) are often taught exclusively with traditional
characters. In comparison there is essentially no usage of simplified
characters at all in Taiwan.

The two scripts essentially have a one-to-one correspondence with each other
anyways so it's not really that hard to go between the two if you have full
fluency in one.

~~~
derefr
I would argue that, due to merging different characters together, simplified
Chinese is more _ambiguous_ in meaning than traditional Chinese. So it's
harder for someone more versed in traditional to read simplified, since
there's a bit of guessing as to which "mapping" back to a traditional
character should be taken. Whereas there's only one way to map a traditional
character to a simplified character, so it's just memorization+recall if you
learn simplified first.

I'd compare reading simplified Chinese characters after a traditional-Chinese
education, to reading Japanese written purely in kana, and trying to figure
out what kanji are meant. It's something that requires active use of your
brain sometimes, where the opposite—translating kanji to kana—is a rote task.

~~~
dwohnitmok
As a note, although simplified merges far more characters than traditional, it
also splits some characters that are merged in traditional. For example, 乾 in
traditional is split into either 乾 (qian2 one of the hexagrams) or 干 (gan1
dry) in simplified.

Regardless, the number of simplified characters for which the merger of
traditional characters happens is small, even more so compared to the number
of Chinese characters you see on a day-to-day basis. On top of that, the vast
majority of these mergers involve one character that in traditional Chinese is
archaic and very rarely seen or are considered obscure variant characters of
the same word in traditional Chinese. I can only think of maybe a dozen or so
examples that show up in Chinese you're likely to read on a day-to-day basis.
Even fewer if what you're reading doesn't have a lot to do with ancient China.
That's why I say it's essentially a one-to-one correspondence.

I do hear your argument often from other Chinese speakers to support why
reading traditional characters if you only know simplified characters is
easier than reading simplified characters if you only know traditional
characters so maybe there's something to it.

------
yorwba
The article tries to argue that Classical Chinese is singularly foreign

> ... a fourth reason for the complexity of the topic of this entry is also
> the reason significantly responsible for its being the only one of its kind
> in this Encyclopedia. There are no entries under “Translating and
> Interpreting…” for Greek philosophy, for example, nor German Idealism or
> French Postmodernism. Even Indian philosophy lacks such an entry. This fact
> should bring home not just the singularity of the classical Chinese written
> language, compared to contemporary languages derived from the proto-Sanskrit
> Indo-European family of languages written in alphabet scripts, but remind us
> as well of the greater distance between Chinese and other cultures from past
> to present.

but thankfully acknowledges that the situation isn't so simple even for those
other languages

> ... it is highly unlikely that by utilizing a Sanskrit vocabulary Kant’s
> philosophy is going to come through a translation at all clearly.

The focus on vocabulary and the meaning of individual characters gives me the
impression of someone trying to understand a text in a foreign language purely
by consulting a dictionary, whose definitions may very well have been guessed
from the text you're trying to read! Then the difference to French or German
or even Ancient Greek is that a translator can be reasonably expected to
become fluent in that language, whereas Classical Chinese is more like
Biblical Hebrew. There, too, contradictory translations proliferate, with
ambiguities and gaps left by forgotten words leaving plenty of wiggle room for
the translator to insert their favored interpretation.

~~~
mc32
To me it seems overwrought. We have Chinese philosophers who are experts in
Classical Chinese philosophy who study these things and labor over them. And
we have expert Chinese-English experts as well as philosophers versed in both
modern languages.

So I can’t immediately see how it’s more difficult than looking into Classical
Greek philosophy.

~~~
primroot
Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both have complex detailed grammars that leave
little room for ambiguity. The language of the Dao De Jing has a minimalistic
grammar, where more has to be inferred from context.

~~~
yorwba
People love to blame the grammar, but you won't find anyone mentioning being
made out of wood, hitting balls or any sports in a philosophical discussion on
the question of "What is it like to be a bat?", which is understood to belong
in the realm of animal consciousness. That's despite there not being any
grammatical distinction between the two kinds of bats, they're only implicitly
disambiguated by the context.

In my experience, context dependence only becomes noticeable when you don't
understand, so foreign languages always appear to require more contextual
knowledge than one's mother tongue. If you actually try to use a formal
grammar to generate all possible parses for a sentence, you'll notice your
brain filters out a lot of nonsensical but grammatically valid
interpretations.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> If you actually try to use a formal grammar to generate all possible parses
> for a sentence, you'll notice your brain filters out a lot of nonsensical
> but grammatically valid interpretations.

Indeed. Canonical example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana)

~~~
posterboy
The stress of the words is different depending on PoS, unless you don't even
try, there's little room for ambiguity. In writing, correcting the spelling
error to _fruit-flies_ solves the problem. The issue is real, but the example
is naiv.

------
argd678
Despite being from the west, I find Chinese and eastern philosophy in general
pretty straight forward since they’re just talking about fundamental
observations of the mind which are universal and can filter out the
misunderstandings of the translators well enough I feel. Language aside, in
the cases where it’s clear to me the translator doesn’t understand is normally
when to comes to basic fundamental observations about the mind, it’s as though
in the west there’s basically no knowledge of the mind itself, so I think the
west would have an easier time with eastern texts after observing their minds
a bit closer. Typically westerns confuse the mind with the biology of the
brain and go off track that way. My observations at least.

~~~
primroot
> since they’re just talking about fundamental observations of the mind which
> are universal

I have to politely disagree. In fact there are lots of subjects in common
between so called Eastern and Western philosophy. Maybe you are mostly
thinking about Yoga. Just reading the beginning of this piece of text today
[https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=41979&remap=gb](https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=41979&remap=gb)
made me think about a phrase used by Jesus and then much later by Marx "Let
the dead bury their dead."

~~~
argd678
More just the phenomena that happens when there is an honest investigation
into the mind. The west has never attempted it, at least I’ve looked high and
low, and the closest thing I could find was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
However still it’s superficial, like Yoga and western religions in that it
never directly addresses the mind itself; it’s always focused on the content,
as opposed to the commonality between content to understand the mind which is
transparent. This might seem like a lofty claim, but is indeed what shaped the
east fir thousands of years and is what makes it different from the west.
That’s the root.

------
bytematic
(context: white American from midwest). I found it a very mind-expanding
journey to try and read the tao, I basically had to look up each page and read
what it meant. I was also listening to a TAO podcast with a newbie, that
helped a lot. Now I can semi-get by on my own and it led me to look at other
Chinese philosophies.

------
guiltygatorade
As a Chinese kid, I remember first coming into contact into Chinese philosophy
around 11 or 12 and it was basically impenetrable. Comics like these by Tsai
Chih Chung (Cai Zhi Zhong) in Chinese helped me "get" some of it:

[https://www.amazon.com/Zhuangzi-Speaks-Nature-Chih-chung-
Tsa...](https://www.amazon.com/Zhuangzi-Speaks-Nature-Chih-chung-
Tsai/dp/0691008825)

Edit: Found a non-amazon link for some preview -
[https://books.google.com/books/about/Zhuangzi_Speaks.html?id...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Zhuangzi_Speaks.html?id=DJNxvtO3VwEC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button)

