Translating and Interpreting Chinese Philosophy
The article tries to argue that Classical Chinese is singularly foreign<p>&gt; ... 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.<p>but thankfully acknowledges that the situation isn&#x27;t so simple even for those other languages<p>&gt; ... it is highly unlikely that by utilizing a Sanskrit vocabulary Kant’s philosophy is going to come through a translation at all clearly.<p>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&#x27;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.