Translating and Interpreting Chinese Philosophy
An important point that I think this article leaves out is the relationship of Classical Chinese to modern Chinese.<p>Often I&#x27;ve found that translating Classical Chinese into modern Chinese is easier than translating Classical Chinese into modern English.<p>It gives three English translations of a poem from the Book of Odes (Shijing 诗经), namely the &quot;Cock&#x27;s Crow&quot; (not sure if there&#x27;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 &quot;court&quot; or &quot;dawn&quot;, which you see in Legge&#x27;s and Pound&#x27;s choices of &quot;the court is full&quot; and &quot;crowding the hall&quot; vs Waley&#x27;s choice of &quot;full daylight&quot; but this is a more ordinary single-word-has-multiple-meanings problem).<p>Yet if you look at a modern Chinese translation of the poem, e.g. one found on the Baidu encyclopedia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;baike.baidu.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;国风·齐风·鸡鸣&#x2F;1806628?fromtitle=鸡鸣&amp;fromid=12002905" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;baike.baidu.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;国风·�%...</a>), the same &quot;ambiguity&quot; persists! There is no explicit speaker.<p>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 &quot;Classical&quot;-ified. For example there is a rough ordering of informal, spoken language -&gt; informal, written language -&gt; popular nonfiction -&gt; modern academic articles (about the humanities) -&gt; full-on Classical Chinese where each stage uses increasingly more &quot;Classical Chinese&quot;-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.<p>There isn&#x27;t really an analogous, somewhat smooth transition of say a French work into a Latin work.<p>Even within Classical Chinese you have different gradations of how &quot;Classical&quot; it is. Early Christian missionaries to China distinguished between &quot;deep&quot; Classical Chinese and &quot;shallow&quot; Classical Chinese and produced different translations of the Bible written in each style.<p>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.<p>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.<p>That is, to a limited degree, I would say the reason that aren&#x27;t articles about &quot;translating Classical Greek&quot; or &quot;translating Sanskrit&quot; 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.<p>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. &quot;Beer me!&quot; 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 &quot;Someone&quot;. Indeed, if you were so inclined, you could call this &quot;verbing a noun.&quot; However, this is extremely informal in English, whereas in Chinese this is extremely formal.<p>Finally, despite all this, I agree with the article that ambiguity plays a part in Classical Chinese that isn&#x27;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.<p>As a minor example, English has a word &quot;lobster.&quot; Spanish doesn&#x27;t (as far as I know)! It has two different words for different organisms that would both fall under the category of &quot;lobster&quot; (langosta, Spiny Lobster, and bogavante, Clawed Lobster). So, how do you translate &quot;lobster&quot; into Spanish? &quot;Lobster&quot; in English intentionally means both langosta and bogavante! There is an ambiguity in the English word &quot;lobster&quot; that Spanish simply doesn&#x27;t have, which you lose if you choose either &quot;langosta&quot; or &quot;bogavante&quot;.<p>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 &quot;clarity and precision.&quot;<p>That was long and convoluted and I&#x27;ll stop here. I&#x27;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.<p>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.