Translation

====Asia====
{{Further|Chinese translation theory}}
[[File:Jingangjing.jpg|thumb|upright=1.0|[[Buddhism|Buddhist]] ''[[Diamond Sutra]]'', translated into [[Chinese language|Chinese]] by [[Kumārajīva]] – world's oldest known dated printed book (868 CE)]]

There is a separate tradition of translation in [[South Asia|South]], [[Southeast Asia|Southeast]] and [[East Asia]] (primarily of texts from the [[India]]n and [[China|Chinese]] civilizations), connected especially with the rendering of religious, particularly [[Buddhism|Buddhist]], texts and with the governance of the Chinese empire. Classical Indian translation is characterized by loose adaptation, rather than the closer translation more commonly found in Europe; and [[Chinese translation theory]] identifies various criteria and limitations in translation.

In the East Asian sphere of Chinese cultural influence, more important than translation ''per se'' has been the use and reading of Chinese texts, which also had substantial influence on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, with substantial [[Sino-Xenic vocabularies|borrowings of Chinese vocabulary]] and writing system. Notable is the Japanese [[kanbun]], a system for [[Gloss (annotation)|glossing]] Chinese texts for Japanese speakers.

Though Indianized states in Southeast Asia often translated [[Sanskrit]] material into the local languages, the literate elites and scribes more commonly used Sanskrit as their primary language of culture and government.
[[File:VOA Perry Link.jpg|thumb|[[Perry Link]]]]
Some special aspects of translating from [[Chinese language|Chinese]] are illustrated in [[Perry Link]]'s discussion of translating the work of the [[Tang dynasty]] poet [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]] (699–759 CE).<ref>[[Perry Link]], "A Magician of Chinese Poetry" (review of [[Eliot Weinberger]], with an afterword by [[Octavio Paz]], ''19 Ways of Looking at [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]] (with More Ways)'', New Directions; and [[Eliot Weinberger]], ''The Ghosts of Birds'', New Directions), ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), pp. 49–50.</ref>

{{blockquote|Some of the art of classical [[Chinese poetry]] [writes Link] must simply be set aside as [[untranslatability|untranslatable]]. The internal structure of [[Chinese characters]] has a beauty of its own, and the [[calligraphy]] in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension. Since Chinese characters do not vary in length, and because there are exactly five characters per line in a poem like [the one that [[Eliot Weinberger]] discusses in ''19 Ways of Looking at [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]] (with More Ways)''], another untranslatable feature is that the written result, hung on a wall, presents a rectangle. Translators into languages whose word lengths vary can reproduce such an effect only at the risk of fatal awkwardness....

Another imponderable is how to imitate the 1-2, 1-2-3 [[rhythm]] in which five-[[syllable]] lines in classical Chinese poems normally are read. Chinese characters are pronounced in one syllable apiece, so producing such rhythms in Chinese is not hard and the results are unobtrusive; but any imitation in a Western language is almost inevitably stilted and distracting. Even less translatable are the patterns of [[Tone (linguistics)|tone]] arrangement in classical Chinese poetry. Each syllable (character) belongs to one of two categories determined by the [[pitch contour]] in which it is read; in a classical Chinese poem the patterns of alternation of the two categories exhibit [[Parallelism (grammar)|parallelism]] and mirroring.<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 49">[[Perry Link]], "A Magician of Chinese Poetry", ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIII, no. 18 (November 24, 2016), p. 49.</ref>}}

Once the untranslatables have been set aside, the problems for a translator, especially of Chinese poetry, are two: What does the translator think the poetic line says? And once he thinks he understands it, how can he render it into the target language? Most of the difficulties, according to Link, arise in addressing the second problem, "where the impossibility of perfect answers spawns endless debate." Almost always at the center is the letter-versus-spirit [[dilemma]]. At the literalist extreme, efforts are made to dissect every conceivable detail about the language of the original Chinese poem. "The dissection, though," writes Link, "normally does to the art of a poem approximately what the [[scalpel]] of an [[anatomy]] instructor does to the life of a frog."<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 49"/>

Chinese characters, in avoiding [[grammar|grammatical]] specificity, offer advantages to poets (and, simultaneously, challenges to poetry translators) that are associated primarily with absences of [[Subject (grammar)|subject]], [[Grammatical number|number]], and [[Grammatical tense|tense]].<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50">[[Perry Link]], "A Magician of Chinese Poetry", ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', vol. LXIII, no. 18 (24 November 2016), p. 50.</ref>

It is the norm in classical [[Chinese poetry]], and common even in modern Chinese prose, to omit subjects; the reader or listener infers a subject. The grammars of some Western languages, however, require that a subject be stated (although this is often avoided by using a passive or impersonal construction). Most of the translators cited in Eliot Weinberger's ''19 Ways of Looking at [[Wang Wei (Tang dynasty)|Wang Wei]]'' supply a subject. Weinberger points out, however, that when an "I" as a subject is inserted, a "controlling individual mind of the poet" enters and destroys the effect of the Chinese line. Without a subject, he writes, "the experience becomes both universal and immediate to the reader." Another approach to the subjectlessness is to use the target language's [[passive voice]]; but this again particularizes the experience too much.<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/>

[[Noun]]s have no [[Grammatical number|number]] in Chinese. "If," writes Link, "you want to talk in Chinese about one rose, you may, but then you use a "[[measure word]]" to say "one blossom-of roseness."<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/>

Chinese [[verb]]s are [[grammatical tense|tense]]-less: there are several ways to specify when something happened or will happen, but [[verb tense]] is not one of them. For poets, this creates the great advantage of [[ambiguity]]. According to Link, Weinberger's insight about subjectlessness—that it produces an effect "both universal and immediate"—applies to timelessness as well.<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/>

Link proposes a kind of uncertainty principle that may be applicable not only to translation from the Chinese language, but to all translation:

{{blockquote|Dilemmas about translation do not have definitive right answers (although there can be unambiguously wrong ones if misreadings of the original are involved). Any translation (except machine translation, a different case) must pass through the mind of a translator, and that mind inevitably contains its own store of perceptions, memories, and values.

Weinberger [...] pushes this insight further when he writes that "every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader's intellectual and emotional life." Then he goes still further: because a reader's mental life shifts over time, there is a sense in which "the same poem cannot be read twice."<ref name="LXIII 2016 p. 50"/>}}
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