English translations don't do justice to 'untranslatable' Chinese concepts

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English translations don't do justice to 'untranslatable' Chinese concepts

By Thorsten Pattberg (Shanghai Daily) 08:20, September 02, 2013

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Editor's note:

Junzi in Chinese has a far richer and more nuanced meaning than its common English translation as "gentleman," just as shengren has different connotations from its English translation as "sage." Hence, the author calls for the use of Chinese concepts as part of a new global language.

I have been working very hard lately. I have restored the shengren 圣人 to East Asia and to world history, and empowered two billion East Asians by green-lightening more of their precious terminologies for worldwide recognition.

It wasn't easy. I am despised by an army of undiscerning academic highbrows, and ridiculed by semi-educated and vengeful "China-experts" whose era of translating Chinese into Western categories has now come to an end. The public is ready for non-European vocabularies.

For 3,000 years the Chinese owned the concept of daxue 大学, yet no Chinaman ever came of the idea — let alone succeeded — to elevate this word permanently into the English language. What to think of such cultural passivity?

Yes, I am fearless and indifferent to convention and limitation. If there are shengren and junzi 君子 in the world, let them be known. And if there is a tianxia 天下 or a datong 大同, we shall restore them to the global lexicon, too.

More and more writers have irreversibly lightened up to the fact that each culture had purpose and design. Europe never invented rujia 儒家; China did. Americans didn't trailblaze the concepts of dharma, karma or yoga; India did. The wisdom of the East is immortalized in its vocabularies and must be liberated from European language imperialism once and for all.

When commentators ask me: "What is that, tianren heyi 天人合一?" I passionately reply: "Glad to hear that you don't know."

Some people say this is madness! Or, maybe we just took the Takarabune and sailed a hundred years ahead of the establishment. I painfully remember, from my young days in Bockum-Hovel in the old German city of Hamm, when my grand grandmother — may her soul rest in peace — used to warn me, and she meant well: "Do you ever mingle with mongoloids!"

Bias against foreign terms

We are still not past anti-foreignism, my dear friends.

On the contrary, these days we are experiencing another: an unprecedented Anglo-Saxon bias against foreign terms: The New York Times, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, Science magazine — the greater part of the Western "mass muscle" — is coercing their authors to hold back on non-English words or eliminate them from their submissions.

The aim: to keep their ever-so-global papers pure, "readable" and appropriate for the species.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you read Persian or Russian thought in print in Western media? The likely answer is: You never did.