Knowledge Is A Polyglot: How To Translate Chinese Key Terminologies

Many Europeans and Americans want to know what the West can learn from China. They clearly sense the uniqueness and singularity of the Chinese tradition, yet they cannot quite put it into words. That’s because Western languages don’t have the words for it: Only China possesses and owns the correct Chinese names for its inventions and ideas. [...] A future global language without the contribution from China seems unthinkable to us.

Praise from the reviewers:

“The dissemination of Chinese ideological and cultural terminology is of great academic and practical significance.”
--ZHUO Xinping, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

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“Just as the study of Western traditional concepts requires the use of ancient Greek and Roman terms, accurate understanding of Chinese thought and culture also requires the use of Chinese terminology to describe and define.”
--LI Yongyi, Chongqing University

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“I personally don't think there should be a global language. The way things have been working in the past is that power has determined the languages that are generally used. That's improper but it's hard to see what to do about it.”
--Noam Chomsky, MIT

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“Contemporary Chinese expressions like hukou and guanxi have already entered English; this inevitable. The situation is different with classical expressions like tianxia: these were ambiguous even in classical times, and are prone to highly ideological interpretations today.”
--David Kelly, China Policy

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“Thorsten Pattberg shows how the twenty-first century must assign a prominent place to Chinese terminology.”
--Paul Dundas, The University of Edinburgh

Excerpts from the book (with permission of the publisher):

Few Westerners doubt the rise of China as a political, economic and military power, yet when it comes to “culture” they tend to ask: What exactly is there to learn from China?

China is land of creativity with a rich heritage. It has the potential to be a world leader in almost every field. To realize this potential, it has to realize the “Chinese Dream”, says the country’s leadership. But before analyzing this “dream”, let’s remind ourselves that President Xi Jinping didn’t actually say “Chinese Dream”. He said zhongguomeng.

Let me explain this crucial detail by entertaining you with the example of an event that could have happened only in China.

A recent China Central Television “Special” entitled “Chinese Dream” and telecast nationwide hosted five leading “China experts” to explain the Chinese Dream and China’s place in the world without even mentioning a single Chinese word or terminology. The speakers were either foreign nationals or Western-educated Chinese. Do you see the irony? China is trying to import its own history from the West, and it comes Chinese-free. It’s like the Americans calling the American Dream “Le rêve américain” and inviting some Frenchmen to explain it to them.

A few days ago, I asked a senior editor of Peking University’s news department why it doesn’t include Chinese words in its English news. She didn’t have an answer, because the idea of using Chinese words in other languages (more so in English) has apparently never occurred to Peking University journalists.

About the author:

Thorsten J. Pattberg (裴德思) is a German philosopher and cultural critic.

He attended Edinburgh University, Fudan University, Tokyo University and Harvard University, and earned his doctorate degree from Peking University.

Dr. Pattberg is a former Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, and former Foreign Research Fellow at Tokyo University. He is the author of several monographs, including: The East-West Dichotomy, Shengren and Inside Peking University.