http://www.gotopku.cn/forum/viewthread.php?tid=52639&pid=587739
There is nothing here that is worth advocating! I remember Teacher Li Silong made a good point: after all, we are studying Western philosophy in China. The purpose is not merely to study Western philosophy itself, but also to understand philosophy in the Chinese context and to spread and develop it. This is neither about learning a useful skill nor about learning a game completely unrelated to our own culture. If Western philosophy is to be introduced into China, how to translate and teach it in Chinese is itself one of the missions of those who work in Western philosophy. Although a particular philosophy researcher may be free to pursue only his own interests, as a whole, Western philosophy teaching still cannot abandon its mission with respect to Chinese culture.
Philosophy is not a tool for operation and analysis; what it demands is not just proficiency in use, but “understanding.” In any case, if we are always mainly thinking in our mother tongue, then only by turning what we have learned into our mother tongue can we truly digest and understand it. I really do not know: for someone who cannot even think clearly in Chinese, what good can there be in writing homework and papers in English? Does it really help us enter the temple of philosophy, and help philosophy enter our thought and life? For those of us whose native language is Chinese, does writing directly in English actually help us express and sort out our own views without obstruction? How many great philosophical works in history were written in a non-native language, even though those philosophers were often proficient in several languages?
Among the various tasks of scholars, translation is one of the most demanding and most difficult, yet many professors today seem to look down on this work. On the one hand they hand this kind of work over to graduate students; on the other hand they simply toss untranslated textbooks and materials to their students to read, using “translation is after all unreliable” (which is certainly true) as an excuse to evade their own responsibility. In fact, not only is cross-linguistic translation unreliable, but any process of paraphrase and introduction is necessarily a kind of distortion; the interpreter’s own thought always seeps in. And this process of paraphrase is, on the one hand, a kind of alteration, but on the other hand also a bridge. Are not teachers and professors precisely meant to serve as bridges between students and the original texts? If the best way to begin is to bypass possible deformation and go straight to grinding through the original, then what do we still need professors for? Since professors are destined to play the role of transmitters, why should they shift responsibility onto the ambiguity of translation?
Personally, when I recommend introductory readings, although I stress that one must choose foreign authors’ works, I still advocate Chinese translations more strongly (even bad translations)—even for someone with a very high level of English and absolutely no reading barriers, if one is after all still accustomed to thinking in Chinese, then it is better to begin with Chinese-language readings. Why? Because it is obviously easier for Chinese to stir our thinking and more likely to arouse resonance in us. Bad translations may often convey the original author’s meaning incorrectly; however, if we do not hope to study the original author’s thought, and merely hope to gain a bit of insight from reading, then imperfect translation can still do the job.
Once the learner gradually finds the way in, he or she will naturally discover the urgency of reading foreign-language originals. At that point, although one may still not be accustomed to thinking in a foreign language, one has already become familiar with the way philosophy thinks; then, when one goes on to read foreign-language literature, one will probably be able to enter more quickly into the thought offered by the author.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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