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Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 02:09:40 -0400
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To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Spiritual texts?
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Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 04:51:51AM +1300, Sam Vilain wrote:
> 
>>Winning over several hundred million english speaking christians
>>might be worth the years it would take to translate the bible to
>>lojban, but a more `profitable' endeavour might be to translate
>>the 81 `chapters' (more like short poems) of the Tao Te Ching to
>>win over a billion Chinese.  After all, if it is a truly graceful
>>language, then it should be able to describe the way of all things
>>gracefully too.
>>
>>A free (GPLed) English translation of the Tao Te Ching is at:
>>
>>  http://www.chinapage.com/gnl.html
> 
> 
> Double translations are *BAD*.
> 
> This really needs to wait on a native Mandarin speaker lojbanist.
> 
> -Robin
> 
It's not a question of being a native Mandarin speaker, since no one is 
a native speaker of Classical Chinese (in fact you could argue that no 
one was in that era either).  What we need is a Sinologist.

To give a trivial example,  when I was studying Chinese, I noticed that 
the line in the Tao Te Ching normally translated as "there are machines 
that can do the work of a hundred men" could be translated as "there are 
officials in charge of a hundred men."  I mentioned this to one of the 
professors, and she said, "Oh no, the word didn't have that other 
meaning in those days."

On a more general point, for translation, you don't need to be a native 
speaker of the language you are translating _from_, just the language 
you are translating _to_, which admittedly is a bit tricky in the case 
of Lojban.

robin.tr

-- 
"A Perl script is "correct" if it gets the job done before your boss 
fires you."
  - Larry Wall

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Univeritesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin