Talk:Tao Te Ching
Translation Etiquette and Accuracy
Michael, perhaps you are more familiar with definitive translations of foriegn texts than I, but when you assert a particular Kanji Ideogram _is_ translated thus and so I find I must disagree. There are many "ways" that can be translated...
no...pun intended.
I know it seems somehow less informative to say that a word "can be translated" or "may be" a particular English word, but I assert that that is the most accurate we are going to get. What's even worse, in translations from every other language I've encountered, there are always subtleties that become lost. Double entendre almost never work, and sometimes it's the real message that becomes obscured by the literal or "accurate" translation. --David Yamakuchi 22:13, 22 January 2008 (CST)