道 Dao Knowledge Base

The Words Are Not the Thing: How This Site Translates

An editorial on the translation policy of this knowledge base — why qi stays romanized, why wuwei is 'non-action,' why some sentences are marked untranslatable, and what translation choices can and cannot do.

EDITORIAL SYNTHESISSCHOLARLY INTERPRETATION

Every page on this site rests on translation, and every translation rests on choices. This editorial states the choices, because a knowledge base that hides its translation policy is hiding its evidence.

The policy, stated

1. Technical terms stay romanized when English lacks the word. Qi, wuwei, zuowang, dantian, ziran — the site’s default is pinyin plus gloss, not a forced English equivalent. The reason is evidentiary, not aesthetic: “vital energy,” “non-action,” “sitting in oblivion” are interpretations wearing the clothes of translations. The pinyin term keeps the reader aware that a choice is being made, and lets the same term carry the same reference across 100 pages. Where an established scholarly rendering exists and helps — Kohn’s “sitting in oblivion” for zuowang, Watson’s prose for the Zhuangzi — it is used and attributed.

2. Recommended renderings are recommendations, stated as such. Wuwei → “non-action” (better than “inaction,” which imports passivity); zuowang → “sitting in oblivion” (Kohn); 黜聪明 → “dismiss hearing and sight” (not “expel intelligence,” which smuggles in a different claim); 心斋 → “fasting of the mind.” Each is a recommendation with reasons, recorded on the relevant glossary and concept pages — not a decree.

3. Untranslatable sentences are marked untranslatable. The 吾/我 distinction in 今者吾丧我 — two different words for the self in one breath — has no English equivalent; the page says so and shows the tradition’s two-word reading instead of pretending the English can carry it. 复命’s 命, the 鐻 in Artisan Qing, the contested 骨/滑 variant — each is flagged with its alternatives rather than silently resolved.

4. Translation problems are content, not noise. The site’s convention is that a translation page states its difficulties in a closing “translation problems” section. A reader who knows where the text is contested knows more than one who has been given a smooth sentence — because the smooth sentence hides the one place the tradition itself disagrees.

What translation can and cannot do

What it can do: carry the sentence, the image, the argument; preserve the structure of a claim (this is a warning, that is a method, that is a question); keep the classical text’s own vocabulary stable across the site so that ch. 6’s 堕肢体 and ch. 19’s 忘吾有四枝形体 visibly rhyme.

What it cannot do: settle interpretive disputes; replace the original as evidence (every page links its source text); or transport the feel of classical Chinese — the unpunctuated density that lets 致虚极守静笃 stand as a single four-beat unit. For that, the site gives the original characters on every translation page, because the reader who can read them should always be able to check the translator.

The underlying discipline

This is the same discipline as the rest of the site: the original text is the evidence; the translation is testimony about the evidence. Every claim traces to a source, every rendering is a recommendation with reasons, and wherever the tradition disagrees with itself, the disagreement is displayed rather than adjudicated. The words are not the thing. The thing — zuowang, ziran, the ten thousand things returning to the root — is what the words point at. A translator’s first duty is to keep the pointing honest.

Sources