Some scholars have argued with me that China must engage in a dialogue with the West - they mean "in English language." To this I add, yes, but only if the Chinese bring their own terms to the tables. Otherwise the so-called dialogue with the West will always be a Western monologue. In practice, this would mean to identify the untranslatables, and to promote them. Most writings of European "China experts" today are inadequate because they describe a China without Chinese terminologies.
Traditionally, European thinkers translated China at will, always according to their own cultural predicaments. For example "the sage/le sage" became today's preferred (neutral) translation of shengren only in Britain and France, but not so in Germany. The all-favored German word is the biblical "Heilige," meaning saint or holyman. The reason is simple: German language, in contrast to English and French, reserved the noun phrase of "sapientia" (a Latin term for wisdom) not for persons but for fairy tales and legends.
In addition, German language is deeply biblical.
The first major German book in print was Luther's translation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly, the word "heilig," meaning holy, follows the Germans like a dark specter wherever they venture; that's why the works of Karl Guetzlaff and Richard Wilhelm, for example, read like biblical bedtime stories.
The German language, frankly speaking, is uniquely disqualified from translating the Chinese tradition which is entirely non-Christian.
As long as Western China scholarship floats on misleading European terminology, the West isn't learning anything new from Asia. In this century, it will be necessary to depart from some Western erroneous translations. The East isn't just an appendix to the Western lingo; it has more to offer than the West could ever satisfactorily translate.
The key is to adopt Chinese terminologies. So that, one day, we may have something, anything really, to celebrate for being truly and faithfully Chinese.
Thorsten Pattberg is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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