Robin Lee Powell wrote:
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.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.htmlDouble translations are *BAD*. This really needs to wait on a native Mandarin speaker lojbanist. -Robin
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