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Common
Translation Errors Overview
Reversing Concepts
Defective Part of a Whole
Commentary in Translation
Vague,
Meaningless Language
Stilted, Flowery Language
Silted, Flowery Language
 Sun Tzu wrote simply and directly. The
simplicity of his mathematical style is one of its virtues and one of the
reasons his system is as useful today as it was when it was developed two and a half
millennia ago. Unfortunately, few translations are written as directly and
clearly as the original.
Many translations lapse into "fortune
cookie" talk. This is easy to do because ancient Chinese is a conceptual
language, which offers the translator a broad range of choices in expressing a
particular idea. Fortune-cookie translating means choosing vague, flowery, and
pretentious words such as "wisdom" and "benevolence" over more direct, common
words such as "intelligence" and "caring." If you string together enough
flowery phrases, the text sounds wise, even as its meaning becomes harder to
understand.
Let us look at one example from another
popular translation:
"Military tactics are like
unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downward."
Sounds almost biblical, doesn't it? We don't say things like "like unto"
much any more. Nor do we say that
something "hastens downward." There is technically nothing
wrong with this translation, but it makes the text more difficult to understand.
Modern English is more direct and straightforward and more like Sun Tzu's writing style in Chinese. His language wasn't convoluted, ornate, or
flowery. There is no reason that Art of War translations should be.
What are the key ideas in this passage? Ground has measurable characteristics. High and low are opposite extremes on a
spectrum measuring one important characteristic, that of elevation. For Sun Tzu,
all such extremes can be evaluated in terms of emptiness (low) and fullness
(high). Since all natural systems naturally move toward emptiness, we leverage
the forces of nature when we move toward emptiness as well.
There is a special danger in translating
precise formulas into convoluted phrases. When words are not used to translate
characters consistently, precision is lost. In this case, using the terms "high
places" and "downward" retains some of the meaning but loses the vital sense of
direct opposites that you have in "high" versus "low" or, alternatively,
"up" versus "down," which misses the whole point Sun Tzu is really making.
Of course, in some cases the language isn't the fault of the translator.
Many of the translations available today were written more than seventy years ago
(though not the example above). We can forgive translators who were writing in
their own contemporary language. Some of the translations sold today were written
more than seventy years
ago. However, one of the most
popular translations, Griffith's, probably has the most convoluted language and
it wasn't written as long ago as others.
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