Native English speakers, and especially native English speakers who do not have fluency in another language, also often have a "familiarity breeds contempt" situation going on with their own language and are not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language, filled with cultural allusions, subtleties in the connotations versus the denotations, rich histories than span continents behind many words, distinct poetical traditions, and many other quirks.
It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too. They are two languages that spent thousands of years estranged from each other, so, unlike the European languages which are all different but coevolved, they are both different from each other in a lot of ways. The richness of languages that have grown apart from each other inhibits translations in both directions not just because the concepts in the original language are not precisely present in the other, but also because you can't help but invoke the rich concepts of the target language that don't match.
I'm sure a Chinese person reading just this very post could write about the implications carried in the word "continent" and how that is wrapped around a lot of cultural assumptions around how things are separated (if you don't know what I mean, google around for discussions around "how many continents are there"), the etymology of "quirk" and its many nuances, the connotations embedded in the word "estranged" and why I chose that one over, say, the more neutral "separated", the implications behind "coevolved", and make English sound as amazing as English speakers make Chinese sound... and that would be because both are correct.
> It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too
Yes, definitely. People who think studying "dead" languages is a loss of time are foolish.
There's even a somewhat "gain" of information which can chaotically appear in translation. For example if we decompose "道" as "walking" and "head" and translate it in French we get "une tête qui marche", which means both "a walking head" or more interestingly, "a working head."
But it's not because English is richer than commonly believed than Chinese isn't still more spacious, which I do believe for multiple reasons, one of them being that it's a pictographic language:
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Some of the "etymology" is more readily available, so to speak. But we could also consider "hidden etymology" -- ancient character forms -- which, as for Western languages, would enrich the interpretations.
> not aware of the fact that English is also a rich language
Quite. For any given language, it’s always those who either least understand it (the ‘Japanese grammar is easy’ people) or speak it natively (the ‘English lacks the poetry of other languages’ types) who underestimate its complexity. Not to mention the additional effect of exoticism.
Anyone who says ‘[language] encodes more information than [language]’ is in most cases talking rubbish — especially when comparing two languages that seem to encode quite enough to be preferred by much of the word.
It isn't just Chinese -> English that loses information. The other direction does too. They are two languages that spent thousands of years estranged from each other, so, unlike the European languages which are all different but coevolved, they are both different from each other in a lot of ways. The richness of languages that have grown apart from each other inhibits translations in both directions not just because the concepts in the original language are not precisely present in the other, but also because you can't help but invoke the rich concepts of the target language that don't match.
I'm sure a Chinese person reading just this very post could write about the implications carried in the word "continent" and how that is wrapped around a lot of cultural assumptions around how things are separated (if you don't know what I mean, google around for discussions around "how many continents are there"), the etymology of "quirk" and its many nuances, the connotations embedded in the word "estranged" and why I chose that one over, say, the more neutral "separated", the implications behind "coevolved", and make English sound as amazing as English speakers make Chinese sound... and that would be because both are correct.