 With classical Chinese context is almost always essential for translation, making some interpretation equally necessary. This may be a low level of interpretation, of course; simply ascertaining the correct subject of a sentence where no subject is present, or inferring a verb from a prior occurrence, without going into any metaphysical speculations. We should note in passing, however, that this Chinese example does not automatically refute the machine translation claim of the separateness of the two efforts of translation and interpretation. If it is indeed the case that classical Chinese is not a close transcription of speech (which it isn’t), but embodies a grammar (which it pretty much does), it can be argued that it is thus at least somewhat not a natural language in the way Natural Language Processing scholars use the term for written documents they work with, and hence not a genuine counterexample to the AI claim.