On Translation

The Problem of Translating Classical Chinese into Modern English

At some point, after living and working in East Asia for a decade, and reading the classics in English for many decades, I wanted to access the underlying texts. What do they really say?

This, of course, requires learning Classical Chinese, which is actually not that difficult. I taught myself basic sentence syntax and grammar during a two-week lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic by diving directly into translating representative phrases from the Analects, Sunzi, Mozi, Mengzi, and Zhuangzi using a Stanford self-study course. The writing style from 500 BC is generally concise and straightforward, making the Chinese classics accessible to anyone, unlike their wordy Western counterparts such as Nietzsche or Kant, which are often only understood by intellectual elites. Regular people have been reading, discussing, and applying the classics in their lives for thousands of years. If you like solving puzzles over a cup of coffee, you may also enjoy deciphering ancient Chinese phrases.

As soon as you start doing that, however, you instantly realize a number of things that are going on in the underlying language and underlying way of thinking, which makes it difficult to express in the target language English…

Classical Chinese is open, often without conjunctions, often without a stated subject, with multi-functional characters that could be a noun, verb, or adjective, with no singular/plural, without gender pronouns, without present/past conjugations, without cluttering connecting words, and without punctuation. In two words, classical Chinese is both terse and expansive.

Modern English, on the other hand, is wordy and specific, with forced causation-based conjunctions and much specificity demanded in its grammar that limits meaning. This is why there are many different translations of the Chinese classics into Modern English, all of which can be one correct facet of the multidimensional total meaning (although many end up being wrong due to forced overspecificity).

This linguistic realization, itself, is part of understanding the classics!

Once we move into the native language, it demands that we “think in Sino.” From here, how can we move elegantly, in the fewest number of moves, back into the target language of English? It’s a real problem because the English language itself demands that we “think in Anglo.” But we are not here for Anglo philosophy; we are here for the thinking of Sino-philosophy.

To combat this problem, and as a learner to focus on a base translation that reflects native grammar and thinking in the most “invisible translator” way, I have intuitively reached for a new method:

1. Leave the poetry format: Classical Chinese isn’t written as a paragraph, but rather lined up artistically, and geometrically like a crossword puzzle, using parallelism. While the Analects isn’t the Dao De Jing, I was surprised by just how elegant and poetic it is. We break this when we reorder the sentence syntax and make it a paragraph.
2. Leave language terse: One of the first things you notice when accessing classical texts is just how “bam * bam * bam * end” the ancients spoke, relative to the long-winded and flowery language of English renderings. A definitive characteristic of classical Chinese is the terse communication of existential things using powerful ancient glyphs. We break this in wordy English, therefore…
3. Leave out connecting words: Adding words required by English for proper grammar is a slippery slope that massively expands sentence length and narrows the meaning from the broad native meaning. Instead, we can use broken English and deal with some of the fallout by a) liberal use of punctuation, and b) considering it poetry which can artistically break rules.
4. Use literal meanings: Often, we can opt for a more understandable translation by using a more sophisticated word that explains the underlying meaning. However, we could instead opt for the most basic literal meaning in 500 BC. For example, instead of 重 as a metaphor for “seriousness,” just let it be the literal meaning “heavy.”
5. Do not explain: It has always been the case that you needed to consult the commentary. Even native speakers cannot decipher classical Chinese without the help of the commentary and a modern Chinese translation. Why should it be different in English? Why should we add things in translation to make it understandable? Instead, we can leave it big and open, somewhat “broken,” like it is in the native language. These are puzzles for the reader to solve, and we can offer some solutions in the commentary.

The result of experimenting with this method so far has rendered poetic, terse, base, sometimes “broken” phrases with big open meaning, which is not unlike the style of the original. Additionally, this “one-for-one” mapping is good for learners of classical Chinese and for inviting criticism from experts due to the ease of spotting peculiarities in the translation. “Broken English” is perhaps better in this situation.

An example:

Let’s consider verse 1.9: 1) the original, 2) a base literal translation, and 3) Legge’s translation:

慎終追遠，
民德歸厚矣。

Be mindful of the end; pursue the distant.
The peoples’ virtue returns to substantiality.

Let there be a careful attention to perform the funeral rites to parents, and let them be followed when long gone with the ceremonies of sacrifice — then the virtue of the people will resume its proper excellence.

In this example, we went from 8 characters, to 14 words in my method, to 30 words in Legge’s translation. That’s a 275% increase in characters to words! The latter method 1) breaks the parallel phrases, 2) breaks the terse style of the author, 3) uses around 10 words for grammar clutter such as “a” and “the,” 4) departs from the literal meaning of the characters, 5) adds a simplistic logic-based conjunction, “then,” when there is no relationship between the two phrases specified at all, and 6) becomes an explanation rather than just a translation. Legge created a good rendering of what it means, but not what it says. And what was completely lost: how it says it.

I think of this process as a game of chess: we want to win elegantly by moving from the native language to the target language in the fewest possible moves.

An Audience Problem…

It is much easier to completely rearrange Chinese phrases into comfortable English and add words to them in order to communicate what we think they mean, which is perhaps why there are almost no literal “word-for-word” style translations of the Chinese classics in English.

But the other reason, noted by Paul R. Goldin in his entertaining essay “Those Who Don’t Know Speak,” is that the English market wants a fully digested product. Goldin notes that in Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Dao De Jing, by one who cannot read classical Chinese, “the requisite hubris is astounding.” I would add that the laziness, and lack of shame, is similarly astounding. But worse, the American audience loves it: “it enjoys the highest ranking on Amazon: 3,489.” From studying the comments, he concludes that “respondents explicitly prefer the simplicity of these pseudotranslations.” Goldin nailed the audience problem in his closing statement:

The Daode jing is old; it is alien; it is Chinese; and it is difficult. These are the recalcitrant facts that too many readers seem disinclined to ac­cept. Instead, they seek out the most facile translations and consume insipid approximations of the original. This phenomenon must be attrib­utable at least in part to intellectual laziness. Chinese philosophy made simple is no longer Chinese philosophy. -Paul R. Goldin, “Those Who Don’t Know Speak”

We see the same thing with the endless “Confucius said” non-referenced quotes on the internet, almost none of which appear in the Analects. When not outright fraud, which they usually are, they are attempts to simplify to liberal pop culture to the point of being their own, Western, philosophy.

A Return to Seriousness…

These ancient Chinese texts have survived 2,500 years without our attempts to make them simple or “feel inspirational.” They do not require our assistance. We require theirs. To then misinterpret them as what we already know, Western philosophy, is against reason. Therefore, my philosophy as I try to access and understand these source texts is a sequential, word-for-word translation that is as literal as possible. Commentary is the place of elaboration and interpretation.

Originally published at https://www.solzi.net.