信達雅：The Three Pillars of Translation

This post is the third in a series of essays on translation (here is the first one on “Why I translate the Chinese medicine classics”, and here is the second one on “The Challenges of Translating CCM”). Today, I want to introduce my Western readers to the traditional Chinese ideal of translation, which is often expressed in Chinese as a combination of three goals:

1. 信 xìn: being reliable, authentic, true, i.e., faithful to the original;

2. 達 dá: penetrating, reaching the reader, being intelligible, bringing the point across; and

3. 雅 yǎ: being elegant, eloquent, and refined, i.e., being a pleasure to read.

Those of us in the profession of Chinese medicine are used to looking at translation as a one-way street from China and East Asia to the West, both linguistically and medically. But, as usual, it can be very helpful to step out of our own box and consider the issue from a different angle, or in other words, look at the Chinese experience of translating not out of, but into their language (or medicine, religion, philosophy, etc.), to see whether this critical distance might not help us refine our own efforts. I would love to read any comments you may have after reading this essay…

For what is arguably the most challenging and culturally significant translation process in Chinese history, at least before the influx of modernity and Western knowledge in the 19th century, we must go way back in history, almost two millennia as a matter of fact! Over the first few centuries of the Common Era, a historic interchange occurred between Indo-European, Central Asian, and East Asian cultures when Central Asian merchants, monks, and explorers, traveling eastward on the Silk Roads, brought Buddhism into China, along with exotic languages, foods and medicines, music, fashion, and other religions. The power of this mutually transformative exchange is expressed in the title of a classic history text by the Dutch sinologist Erik Zürcher from the early 1970s: “The Buddhist Conquest of China.” From my classes on Chinese Buddhism decades ago in graduate school, I also remember a subtitle from a paper or book that stuck with me: “How Buddhism became Chinese and China became Buddhist” (but unfortunately don’t have the exact citation).

As a translator of Chinese medicine into Western languages today, it is illuminating for me to explore the struggles, conversations and arguments, different strategies employed and discarded, and evolving sophistication in the formation of technical terminology, in the understanding of core concepts, and ultimately in the increasing ability of Chinese translators and readers to grasp the content of Buddhist teachings not just through traditional Chinese perspectives but on their own terms. Without the creative, engaged, passionate work of thousands of individuals over multiple centuries, we would not have Chan, much less Japanese Zen, Buddhism, to name just one example. For obvious reasons, this perspective eases my mind and lets me take a deep breath when I get frustrated by all the obstacles in the way of Chinese medicine being developed and taught and practiced to its full potential in the West right now. I am not known for my patience, and at times, the work can seem overwhelming. And yet, when students of Chinese medicine begin their educational journey today, they have access to publications, online and in-person courses, teachers from a multitude of traditions and specializations, institutional choices, and professional recognition that their colleagues fifty years ago could have only dreamed of. And of course it is tantalizing to wonder whether Chinese medicine might have the power to transform Western and global culture in the same way that Buddhism was able to transform Chinese culture! In my wildest dreams, I can see it happening, and enthusiastically work towards that goal, I must admit.

To flesh this out a bit, let us explore the three translation ideals that I started us out with, which are often cited as originating in the context of Buddhist translation in early medieval China. While each of them certainly has a long and illustrious history in Chinese culture and literature, it is perhaps significant that the person who explicitly combined them into the triple goal of translation work was Yán Fù 嚴復 (1853-1921), the famous modernizer and translator of such modern English authors as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. As a key figure in the intellectual history of modern China and a passionate reformer, he was keenly aware of the real-life importance of his translation work, most notably his translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, which was published under the title Tianyanlun 天演論 (“On Heavenly Evolution”) in 1898.

To maximize the impact of his work on his readers and ultimately inspire government reforms to save his country, Yán Fù emphasized that a translation has to fulfill three requirements, which are encapsulated in the three characters that I started this essay with:

1. 信 xìn: to be faithful, true to source

To be authentic, a translation must accurately convey the original meaning and intent of the author. This may sound straightforward, but anybody who has read five different English versions of any difficult passage from the “Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic” will know how often the final product says more about the translator’s agenda or background than about the original text. To cite just one simple example that I already mentioned in the previous essay on translation, a desire to demonstrate the great wisdom, longevity, and sophistication of traditional Chinese medicine might cause us to translate the ancient disease 腳氣 jiǎoqì with its modern biomedical meaning of “beriberi” instead of the literal “foot/lower leg Qì” in a traditional text. This choice will inevitably lead to a misunderstanding of early passages when it was regarded not as a condition of nutritional deficiency but one of conspicuous consumption and a sedentary life, or related to regional miasmas.

As our understanding of classical Chinese medicine increases, so does our ability to translate authentically and avoid introducing concepts that come from a very different time and place. While it is hard for us to recognize this problem in our own work, it is easy for historians of Chinese religion and philosophy to see how the earliest Chinese translators of Buddhism initially used familiar terms from their own heritage, most notably Daoist philosophy, to make sense of foreign Indian concepts and only gradually developed a more sophisticated understanding of the original texts and their contents. Just like we now benefit hugely from the contributions of Westerners who have lived in China, become fluent in Chinese, and studied directly under Chinese masters, and from the collaborations of Westerners like myself with our Chinese friends and colleagues, so did Chinese Buddhists benefit from Xuanzang’s journey to the West or Kumarajiva’s leadership of a court-sponsored translation team of Chinese and foreigners working collaboratively for more than a decade in Chang’an. As a matter of fact, I am profoundly moved by the image of Kumarajiva leading a large team of deeply committed translators, motivated by religious devotion and supported financially by the imperial court. Could you imagine the possibilities if we had a similar framework, even for just a month or two?

Needless to say, truthfulness to the source always has to be our very first priority and is absolutely non-negotiable. This must always be the starting point of any translation project, and if you don’t have the skills to translate correctly, you shouldn’t be doing it, I am sorry to say. Medical information has real-life impact on patient lives and must not be passed on casually and lightly. As we all know after the COVID mess, misinformation and disinformation are not only not useful, but can often have unanticipated consequences and cause real harm. Unfortunately, it is hard to evaluate whether this criterion is met for anybody but a fellow translator who is equally fluent in both source language and target language. How do you know when you have made a mistake or need to adjust your understanding based on another person’s research, if you don’t have colleagues to point your mistakes out to you? And as for the reader of a translation, if you don’t know Chinese, how could you possibly determine whether an English translation is truthful to the original? This is why we need critical feedback mechanisms, truly interactive symposia with roundtable discussions and active audience participation, and a peer-review process for professional publications.

2. 達 dá: to reach the reader, to be comprehensible

In addition to being accurate, a translation must be phrased and presented in such a way that the intended reader can understand it, that it actually brings the original author’s point across to the people who the translator is writing for. The most common example for a failure to meet this requirement is perhaps found in academic publications that are simply unreadable for the average acupuncturist and general reader. Of course, we could argue that academics are generally not writing for the general public, or for practitioners of Chinese medicine specifically, and they do in fact usually reach their target readers, which are fellow academics. But what a waste! There have been so many times when I have recommended academic publications to my practitioner students because they contain nuggets of insight that would concretely transform these students’ way of looking at Chinese medicine, only to find out later that they just don’t have the patience, education, academic foundation, linguistic skill, or time to work their way through a lengthy article, let alone a book of several hundred pages, written in dense academic lingo full of historical details and Chinese names. A traditional academic may shrug their shoulders at this requirement since accuracy (our goal #1: 信) and getting the facts straight is more important than anything else in academia. There is even a certain snobbery that can creep in, since we don’t want to “judge a book by its cover.” Or do we?

This is the classic self-perpetuating issue with the ivory-tower education system, that it takes many years of rigorous academic training in reading and writing to get to the level of publishing academically. Once academic authors have succeeded in getting there, they tend to forget how much this training has changed their reading and writing skills, and they either don’t know or don’t care that their work is incomprehensible to the average person on the street. I am fortunate in that my teaching activity continually allows me to interact with practitioner students and colleagues, as opposed to academic ones. In spite of the beloved label and ideal of the “scholar-physician” in traditional and modern Chinese medicine circles, there really is a difference between an academic and a practitioner, and that is a-okay. The biggest problem is that both sides don’t know what they, and the other side, do and don’t know! This unfortunately leads to a lot of lost opportunities for fruitful interaction, exchange of knowledge, and growth in understanding on both sides. For this reason, I very much appreciate this second goal of 達 dá, literally “to reach,” as a reminder for my work to always keep in mind my goal of communicating effectively to my readers. What that has meant for me concretely in my publishing is that I have experimented with a variety of different layouts and formatting tools over the years and learned to include features like footnotes, critical discussions, explanatory “boxes” by clinical colleagues, appendices to look up technical terminology, even adding different type fonts or pretty backgrounds to set off different textual layers, etc., to bridge the Grand Canyon between a raw literal translation and a text that makes sense to the average non-academic, clinically-oriented reader. To take this goal a step further, I am now producing podcasts, video recordings, blogs, and short bite-sized online posts, distributed in regular intervals in mentorships, to reach an audience that can no longer sit down to read a dense book of several hundred pages. To quote Confucius, 「子曰：辭，達而已矣」“Words! As long as they reach, that’s all that matters.”

Lastly, since I specialize in texts that are so far removed geographically, culturally, and linguistically from my target audience, my favorite way of “translating” is actually to read the original source together with my students and to share my translation process in real time, as we are all collaborating in making sense of it.

3. 雅 yǎ: To be refined, elegant

Now we come to the fun part, at least for me as a poet and somebody who really loves writing as a daily practice and craft. I am pretty sure most of us have read translations that were accurate (from what we can tell) and made sense, but did not bring us joy, inspire us into action, or leave a lasting impact. In fact, I would argue that this third goal is one that we translators disregard far too often, to the detriment of our readers. Maybe as a reader, we don’t notice the absence of elegance, but here I invite you to reflect for a moment on the joy you feel when you read a translation that was crafted with loving care, that perhaps uses a modern English idiom or adds a tiny particle that perfectly portrays the intention of the original. It can be as simple as punctuation marks or paragraph breaks, or the addition of an “Oh!” to bring a translation to life, to make you chuckle, or to feel like you are sitting right there, with the author, reflecting on our shared humanity, and just for a precious instant, bridging that cultural and linguistic gulf between modern life in the West and the world of ancient China. To me, effective writing has to be about more than just bringing the point across accurately. It has to resonate in the heart! For the most part and with the rare exception of some purely functional utilitarian texts, traditional Chinese medical literature was composed by authors with incredible literary skills, attention to every single character and placement thereof, and deep care for rhythm, flow, and structural tools like parallelism and opposition. While the rhetorical tools of classical Chinese authors are very different from our own, I believe that we owe it to these ancient texts to reflect the preciousness of the original content and form by crafting translations in as beautiful a container as we can. In a world that so often prizes cold efficiency over beauty, I very much appreciate the inclusion of 雅 yǎ “refinement” as a full third leg in the solid stool of translation that Yán Fù envisioned over a hundred years ago for his own work in translating the Western literature of modernity for his Chinese readers. This insistence on beauty and flow and elegance, not just in writing but also in clinical practice, from writing formulas to a graceful Qigong move to the loving touch when taking a suffering patient’s pulse, may just be what I treasure most about traditional Chinese medicine…

What do you think?

Note: I sincerely hope that this post will inspire some readers to study classical Chinese with me, instead of just reading translations. It is so empowering and transformative, and YES, after teaching hundreds of students over decades, I can confidently answer that my program will enable you to directly access the classics in the original Chinese. Please consider joining me. The next biannual cohort starts September 11, 2025!