I did confess the pedantry of my amusement-but-sometimes-irritation. I'll indulge myself to point out any substantive translation between two languages will involve expanding some words into phrases while some phrases may be condensed into words. The deeper irony of this way of presenting the issue is that it's usually ubiquitous and common words, which tend to have complex situational meanings that map very messily between languages.
For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.
Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.
Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.
[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.
There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas.
In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for it. The Chinese language has no obligation to translate each character succinctly into a single English word.
In fact, one of the greatest strengths of pictographic languages is the high degree of information density per character. More often than not, a pictograph will translate to an English phrase, not an English word. For native Chinese readers, inference comes naturally, as each character is built out of a set of "radicals," each representing a narrowly defined idea, that act as the primitive building blocks to convey a complex combination of their ideas within one "character."
I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas:
上 下 凹 凸
up down concave convex
I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic elements), but at least it explains the misconception somewhat
@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.
In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system
Do you have a source for the logographic nature of written Chinese being a misconception? I understand that many people use Chinese characters phonetically to write their dialect, but when I did graduate work in Chinese the books and linguistics professors all referred to the writing system as logographic. Perhaps this is a new line of thinking I am just not up on.
Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictographs. Over 95% are compounds, with the first part suggesting the broad category of meaning and the second part suggesting the pronunciation.
> Each single character translates to an English word or phrase
Each single character represents one Mandarin syllable (with a very small number of exceptions, like 儿), which may or may not be its own word. Hence each character may or may not translate into an English word or phrase.
For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.
Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.
Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.
[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.