An Art Form

As I work on the series about the verses in the Tao Te Ching as well as discuss issues with Christians re the Bible on other blogs, I'm struck by the fact that so many people view the task of translation as an exact science. Such people seem to think that all the world views language just like we English speakers do.

In reality, such an assumption couldn't be further from the truth! Every language is based on different ways of expression and it is often difficult -- if not next too impossible -- to do justice to a treatise or tract when attempting to render it readable in a tongue not its own. This problem is compounded when a piece of literature is translated from one language to another and then to another. Each step away from the original voice dilutes the meaning and often completely distorts the context.

Even when the translation is simply from one language to another, if the two languages share little in common, it becomes very hard to capture the true essence of the work. This is one of the difficulties with rendering the Tao Te Ching in English as the worldviews of our language are altogether different than Chinese.

So, far from being an exact science, translation is an art form -- the poetic attempt to capture the essence of the original text in a language that often is fundamentally and radically different. As I continue on with the aforementioned series, I've decided consciously to make use of translations besides the one by Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English (my preference), if for no other reason than to highlight the different ways the Tao Te Ching can be expressed for western eyes.