A Letter on Translation

A reader writes about this journal’s three-language arrangement. The editors reply at the end.

To the editors:

I have translated work in political economy for eleven years. Two points about your language arrangement.

The first is agreement. You wrote that "machine-translated political prose reads as though no one is speaking". I agree entirely. The difficulty in political prose is not vocabulary but register: the same judgement stated flatly and stated with reservation are two different political positions. A machine cannot tell them apart. It picks the most common phrasing, and the most common phrasing is usually the one that commits to nothing.

The second is a caution. I understand the trade-off in machine-converting Traditional Chinese, but note that the difference is not only in glyphs. Simplified 软件 is 軟體 in Taiwan; 信息 is 資訊. Character-by-character conversion will not produce those. Worse are the words used on both sides with different senses: there the machine raises no error and quietly converts wrongly.

A suggestion: put a line on Traditional pages saying the text is machine-converted. A reader who knows that will discount accordingly. A reader who does not will let one wrong word cast doubt on the whole piece.

Zhou Yunzhi

The editors reply: We accept the second point and will add the notice. We will fill in the word list as we go, and we welcome readers sending us what it gets wrong.