The Chinese Written Language and its Capacity to Communicate Wisdom across the Centuries ...and the Challenges Faced in Translation
Tim Clissold shows how the unchanging nature of the Chinese written word connects the past to the present in ways that do not exist in the West. This connection helped a Chinese scientist to win the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine. It is also used in present day economics.
But Tim argues that the greatest lessons for many come from poems written more than 1,000 years ago, that deal with problems that are all too familiar in modern times. These include the plight of refugees, social inequality, homelessness, tax evasion, substance abuse and even the perils of excessive logging.
What, he asks, can mankind learn from these lines as they echo down the centuries?
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The ideas in this feature article are often taken directly from a Royal Geographic Society talk I attended in November, entitled, “Ancient Words for the Modern Age” by the author Tim Clissold who has lived and worked in China for over thirty years. He’s written a number of books about his experiences, including Mr. China, Chinese Rules, and his most recent work, Cloud Chamber. I’ve tried to give credit as clearly as I can to where an idea was introduced by the presenter.
The talk was inspired by what Tim Clissold identified as the Chinese written language’s capacity to pass down wisdom in the fields of engineering, medicine, poetry and philosophy across millennia due to the comparative constancy of its characters (as opposed to, say, the English language).
He discussed how he fell in love with Chinese culture and language when he first arrived in Hong Kong and was fascinated by its beautiful stylised calligraphic form; but how, he wondered, could he ever penetrate the complexity of a language that featured, for example, the 26-stroke character that is the first of the two character word for “Wan Chai”?
I’m also extremely grateful to our Chinese language teachers, Vincent Wang and Jessy Tu, who were very generous with their ideas and time to help me support my classes with a range of clear examples. They were able to add colour and depth with some excellent insights into the challenges/methods that a language learner faces and utilises when translating Chinese into English in fun and exciting ways. These dual themes of the propensity for the Chinese language to communicate wisdom, and the challenges of “taking the language out of its original context” (to refer to a May 2024 TOK Essay Title), were the dual themes of Clissold’s talk and this article.
I hope this article may provide some motivation for those, like me, who have struggled to learn Cantonese or Mandarin by approaching it from a more visual and poetic standpoint, as well as providing some interesting cultural and historical perspectives on the language.
Clissold made the point that while Shakespearean English from 500 years ago is largely comprehensible to a secondary student, the epic poem, Beowulf, written in the West Saxon (Germanic) dialect of Olde English approximately 1,000 years ago is not. Following the Norman Invasion of 1066, Latin became the language of the courts and the nobility. Both these texts would be incomprehensible to a modern reader of English. /topic/Middle-English-language
However, take this beautiful line from the Tang Dynasty poet, Li Bai.
“Without a word from the Sky, the four seasons rotate (and thus all things continue to change), and without utterance from the Earth, all life continues to be born, grow and flourish.”
Li Bai, c. 750 AD
The wonder and eternity of nature are communicated with an immediacy that is hard to believe given the poet wrote these lines over 1,200yrs ago. And there is a tradition for Chinese politicians to use lines of ancient wisdom within their speeches to connect their thinking to the past. President Xi Jinping used Li Bai’s words in his speech at the December 2020 Climate Ambition Summit. And this can, Clissord attests, be read directly from the original text. /the-underappreciation-of-classical-chinese-idioms-xis-climate-speech-1/
When faced with a similar task of translating a line from perhaps the most famous ancient Chinese poet of them all, Du Fu, Y12 TOK students, Tuscany, Henry and Oliver were able to make some meaning and offered a lovely interpretation of a line from an excerpt of Du Fu’s, "On Visiting the Temple of Laozi", written approx. 750 AD. They explained how the poet observes, “the stitching of the Sun and the Moon on the windows..”
The opening to Du Fu’s, “Spring Gaze” was read out by Tim Clissord, and it contains such an evocative opening line as the poet or speaker walks around the ruins of the city after an uprising in Chang’an :
You can see the work the translator has undertaken to represent the literal meaning of the original, while ensuring both the vocabulary and truncated rhythm of the line capture the starkness of the dramatic situation, and nature’s power to endure.
Yet, as you can see with this academic website, many translators have tried to emulate Du Fu’s timeless words, but they all interpret the lines subjectively, sometimes with some quite marked differences that can really change the overarching effect of the line. You’ll be able to pick your own favourite interpretation by viewing the selection via the link: /~ray/ChineseEssays/ChunWang.htm
Yet, it’s not just a matter of choosing the right word to capture the best impression. In the following short video, ICHK Chinese teacher, Jessy Tu, delivers an interpretation of a Chinese nature poem, while making clear the problems of pronunciation in Chinese translation. As we shall see, a change in pronunciation can alter the meaning significantly!
Ms. Tu preceded her engaging reading with a few core lessons that explain some of the hurdles a new Chinese language learner must face.
Firstly, like English words, one character can have very different meanings, such as the examples below, depending on the context in which they are used in the sentence:
There’s also the issue faced with an artistic interpretation of an original text by a calligrapher. An excellent actor or artist will add a certain element of colour and distinction to a script or their interpretation of a certain theme or idea. You can visit the Hong Kong Museum of Art to find out more with their current exhibition, “The Melodious Notes of Chinese Calligraphy”, from which the image on the left below is taken:
This idea can be explored further when applied to understanding Chinese classical art. The video below is a quick 3-minute masterclass to uncover the craft, uniqueness and value of landscapes by Bruce Maclaren, Global Head of Chinese paintings and calligraphy at Bonhams, who describes the close study of art as an “enlightening” experience.
To return to the fundamentals of language, though, Jessy recommended the Chinese language website, The Silk Story, which provides a good bank of resources that focus on the etymology of the Chinese language and its characters. Take this example for “mouth”- the shape clearly resembles in basic form an open mouth, so the simplistic symbolic depiction of rice paddies, the human form etc within the language makes for an accessible means of unpacking simple words.
Many mouths together can indicate a plural but also more to do with tasting as well as quality.
The same variability exists, too, with the character for a person. You can imagine how the first writer in Chinese to decide upon this character saw the figure of a human walking and simplified it to this elegant two-stroke form, before using a stick or flint to etch it into the earliest writing tablets of clay or ox bone.
Yet, you can also derive the words: people, person, human and human being from the same character. This translation business can get really tricky if you’re trying to just state the obvious, let alone communicate artistic nuance…
So, how can you unlock all this knowledge of ancient languages to win a Nobel Prize?
Well, that’s exactly what the Chinese scientist Tu Youyou did when she was awarded her prize for research into a cure for malaria in 2015. Her work was actually carried out much earlier, back in the 1970s at the time of the Vietnam War when both the American and Vietnamese militaries were desperate for a cure for malaria. At the time, Clissord stated, American soldiers were dying more from malarial infections than wounds inflicted in the battlefield at a rate as high as 5:1.
The Americans went all-in on the scientific method and pursued the cure in their laboratories…to no avail. Ho Chi Minh asked the government of Mao Zedong if they could help, and they too used the latest scientific methods, as well as turning their attention back to the hundreds of regional medicine books that had survived across the centuries. Clissord reported a rather stomach-churning cure for leprosy involving eating the scab of a leper. Sounds gross, right? But that process is what we recognise today as vaccination….documented hundreds of years before the “discovery” was accredited by Western scientists to Dr. Edward Jenner for his treatment for smallpox in 1796. /news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination
The books of folkloric knowledge studied by Tu Youyou eventually revealed the answer, and she then applied the scientific method to examining the veracity of these ancient traditional herbal remedies.
And the examples go on… solutions for burst dams that have helped engineers in modern times, as well as naturalistic poetry inspired by the Tao Te Ching which was itself written as early as 200BCE (and which provided many central ideas for my Deep Learning unit: Zen and Sustainability).
I am very grateful to another of our excellent Chinese teachers at ICHK, Vincent Wang, who replied in a very detailed manner to explain the translation technique which he learned at university and which forms the pedagogical approach for his teaching. The full email reply can be found in the notes at the end of this article, but he writes:
“During my graduate studies, I took a course called "Translation Studies," which discussed a Chinese translator from the modern era named Yan Fu. Yan Fu developed a translation theoretical framework known as the "Faithfulness(信), Expressiveness（達）, and Elegance（雅）" translation system. "信" refers to faithfully conveying the meaning and information of the original text, ensuring that the translation corresponds to the content of the original.”
It seems that students in both Ms. Tu’s and Mr Wang’s classrooms are in very good hands indeed- no wonder they’ve performed so well at the recent Debate Competition!
So, will Tim Clissord’s talk propel this “ying guo ren'' to buckle down and eventually break through Chapter One of my Chinese language books at home? We shall see, but it was a really enjoyable talk that has made me really want to open my eyes and pay more attention to the world around me for the lessons of culture and history that can be revealed through paying closer attention.
Other implications for translating Chinese to English
Chinese characters can have many meanings, sometimes they are paradoxically contradictory (certainly the English language also shares this problem). There are 7 symbols in lines of Chinese classical poetry, and let's say there are (at least) three potential meanings for each character, then you have a problem in translating the meaning of this successfully which could be mathematically represented as 3*3*3*3*3*3*3= 2,187 minimum potential interpretations of just one line.
The Chinese language, unlike English, is a null-subject language. This means that it is not possible to determine the subject based on the verb alone, e.g.
There are no changes in the tenses, e.g.: Today, I eat vegetables and drink green tea; Yesterday, I eat vegetables and drink green tea; Tomorrow, I eat vegetables and drink green tea etc.
“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den“: The famous example given by Tim Clissold was a nonsense poem written by Yuen Ren Chao featuring tonal variations of the same shi sound…repeated 96 times!
Vincent Wang Email to JR
Hi Jon,
Thank you for your email. I regret that I won't be able to attend the lesson, but I have some ideas regarding Chinese translation.
During my graduate studies, I took a course called "Translation Studies," which discussed a Chinese translator from the modern era named Yan Fu. Yan Fu developed a translation theoretical framework known as the "Faithfulness(信), Expressiveness（達）, and Elegance（雅）" translation system. "信" refers to faithfully conveying the meaning and information of the original text, ensuring that the translation corresponds to the content of the original.
"達" refers to the translation's ability to make the reader understand and resonate with it. In addition to conveying the information from the original text, translation should also adapt to the target language and cultural background.
"雅" refers to the translation's need for artistic and aesthetic qualities. Translation should strive for linguistic elegance and fluency while maintaining accuracy and clarity. This requirement is of the highest level and is also the most challenging goal to achieve.
It is interesting to note that there are similarities and overlaps between these perspectives and the theory proposed by a German translation scholar, Reiss, regarding text types. Reiss introduced the theory of text types, which emphasizes the importance of considering the specific characteristics and requirements of different types of texts during the translation process. Later criticisms have emerged suggesting that this translation theory may face challenges due to the inherent difficulty of fully categorizing texts based on their types.
When I teach the Y9 Kingston Chinese class, I will simply introduce the overlapping aspects of these two theories to help them better understand modern translations of ancient poetry. Reiss proposed that texts can be classified into two main categories: informative texts and expressive texts. When it comes to understanding ancient texts, I usually employ the informative type for teaching purposes. This is because my goal is to quickly convey the meaning of the text to students. Let me provide an example of translation in both Mandarin Chinese and English. For instance, if I want you to understand the term "春節" (chūn jié in Mandarin), I would translate it as "Chinese New Year." This way, you would grasp the content of the text. This process can be seen as me, acting as a "translator," building a bridge for students and guiding them across. However, when I teach using the expressive type, I would directly translate it as "Chunjie" and provide subtitles. When I employ the expressive type as the primary method of translation, my intention is to sacrifice the literal content of information transmission and allow students to appreciate the cultural, auditory, and formatting elements behind the text.
Therefore, when it comes to poetry or certain ancient literary texts, if our aim is to help students understand cultural phenomena, I would focus on teaching the format and encourage students to explore the underlying meanings. However, when dealing with non-literary texts, I no longer emphasize cultural elements. That's why you may see that I allow students to freely express themselves, whether it's in terms of format or symbols, with the goal of helping them grasp the content.
I saw the translation you provided in the link about the poem translation in Chinese. /~ray/ChineseEssays/ChunWang.htmYou can see that these translation types are not used independently. The expressive and informative types I mentioned earlier are combined in their usage. In some cases, the focus on conveying meaning may result in the loss of the format and rhythm of ancient Chinese poetry. On the other hand, in some instances, prioritizing the preservation of rhythm may lead to the loss of certain aspects of the content and require readers to explore the underlying meaning of the text.
The above are some interesting translation theories and ideas that I find useful, especially when teaching ancient Chinese works. I hope you find them helpful as well.
Thank you!
Vincent
Other Sources:
/blog/chinese-words-with-multiple-meanings/
/~ray/ChineseEssays/ChunWang.htm
The effect of language on economic behaviour. This paper is relatively recent but has not really been fully explored and adopted. Thanks to Alex Hall for this link.