Sze-chuan Pepper and Coca-Cola: the Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese

David Moser

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1980, and is an extremely dif­ficult book to classify or adequately summarize. At the core of the book is the famous 'incompleteness proof in metamathematics of Austrian logician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), whose 1931 paper entitled "On Formally Undecidable Propo­sitions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I" had an momentous effect on the field of mathematical logic. Hofstadter's book can be perhaps best be described as a wide-ranging exploration of this famous proof and its implications concerning minds, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. In the process of pre­senting his ideas, Hofstadter draws on analogies and examples from dozens of diverse domains ranging from molecular biology to Zen Buddhism.

The book is profusely illustrated with prints by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898-1972), whose work, filled as it is with all sorts of paradoxical or impossible scenes, tricks of perspective, and elegant mathematical symmetries, serves to illus­trate the deep notions of isomorphism, self-reference, and paradox at the heart of Gödel's proof.

Each chapter of the book is preceded by a humorous dialogue that, via anal­ogy or allegory, introduces the main ideas of the chapter, and that in its structure or content evokes some piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. For example, the dialogue Crab Canon, in addition to raising some issues discussed in the chapter that follows it, is also structured so that the dialogue reads the same both forwards and backwards (that is, the first line is identical to the last, the second line is iden­tical to the next-to-last, and so on), a structure that echoes a piece from Bach's Musical Offering, the so-called Crab Canon, which sounds the same both forwards and backwards. Another dialogue evokes Bach's suites for unaccompanied violin, in that the second character's lines (the accompaniment) are absent and must be deduced from the content of the main character's lines (the violin). Verbal analogues to fugues, canons, and other contrapuntal devices employed by Bach are found throughout the other dialogues.

Babel 37:2 (1991), 75–95. DOI 10.1075/babel.37.2.03mos ISSN 0521–9744 / E-ISSN 1569–9668 © Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) Revue Babel

76 David Moser

In addition to the isomorphisms to musical devices and structures, the dialogues are filled with Lewis Carroll-like wordplay and whimsy. There are a host of puns, acronyms, acrostics, quasi-technical words, outlandish invented names, allusive terms, punning neologisms, and self-referential jokes, many of which appear once and then are used later many times throughout the book both in chapters and dialogues. There are also many places in the book where conven­tions of typography, punctuation, spelling, and grammar are intentionally violated or played with. In addition, there are many examples of form-content interplay (where the topic discussed in a passage is exemplified by some formal aspect of the passage itself) and situational allusion (where the situation being overtly discussed in a given passage is so strongly reminiscent of another situation known to the reader that in effect, both situations are being referred to simultaneously, one directly and the other indirectly). The use of these formal devices is not gratui­tous; the form-content interplay in the book is meant to echo the self-referential construction that lies at the core of Gödel's proof, and thus it is important for translators to preserve instances of such devices wherever they occur.

Even this extremely brief description of the 777-page book provides some idea of how difficult Godel, Escher, Bach is to translate into any language, par­ticularly one as remote from English as is Chinese. Fortunately, Hofstadter, who is very interested in foreign languages and translation in general, provided a meticulously annotated version of the book for translators to consult. With the aid of this annotated version, the book has already been translated into French, Ger­man, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, and Japanese, in many cases with the active participation of Hofstadter himself.1

Since the People's Republic of China never signed the International Copyright Convention, hundreds of translated books are published every year in China with neither the knowledge nor the consent of the original author or pub­lisher. Hofstadter found out about the projected Chinese version of Gödel, Escher, Bach quite by accident, when one of his colleagues from the University of Michigan returned from a trip to China in 1986 and reported that a team of profes­sors and graduate students at Peking University had undertaken the translation project. Hofstadter immediately contacted professors Wu and Ma, the directors of the project, and found out that 90 percent of the translation had already been completed in first draft. Having previously warded off several minor disasters in the translations-in-progress into other languages, and fearing that, like them, much of this Chinese translation might have missed the point of the original, Hofstadter suggested to Wu and Ma that my input, both as a native English speaker who spoke Chinese and as someone who knew the book well, might prove helpful to their effort. They welcomed this suggestion, and I was added to the translation team.

The manuscripts of the translation were all handwritten (Chinese computer wordprocessing being in a very primitive state at that time), and the numerous

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 77

additions and corrections, along with the usual difficulty Westerners have in read­ing Chinese handwriting, made checking the manuscripts rather difficult. As I slowly became accustomed to reading the the various translators' scrawl, I disco­vered that the basic translation strategy seemed to have been to translate the dialogues rather literally, providing elaborate footnotes or glosses whenever puns or wordplay arose. Most of the structural devices were totally lost (such as the symmetrical reading of the Crab Canon), and most of the form-content isomor­phisms had been blurred or lost. I therefore set to work with two newly-added mem­bers of the team who had some background in literature (all of the other trans­lators had expertise in only computer science, physics, or mathematics) to retrans­late all of the dialogues and substantial parts of many of the chapters in accor­dance with Hofstadter's translation strategy, which involved radical reconstruction of the text so that both the content and the playful language came through in the target language. Since the book deals with an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge from domains like mathematical logic, physics, music, art, linguistics, and computer science, our task was to combine the rigor of high-quality technical translation with the kind of creative reconstruction found in, say, good transla­tions of Alice in Wonderland.

In the following, I recount just a few of the more interesting issues that arose.

When content must defer to form

In one of the dialogues, Six-Part Ricercar, Hofstadter includes a passage that imitates the five successive fugal entries of a secondary theme in the Six-Part Ricercar, a complex six-voice fugue from Bach's Musical Offering.2 Each of the five characters enters the discussion by uttering the same phrase, "The grounds are excellent", but the various contexts of the entries give the word "grounds" five different meanings:

(1) Babbage: The grounds are excellent! We had just enough light to see how well maintained they are. [the grounds of an estate]

(2) Babbage: ...I m sure there are very few grounds for praise, in this case — Crab: The grounds are excellent! [justification]

(3) Crab: ...Well, I wonder if Mr. Tortoise has managed to uncover anything funny in the wiring of those strange-looking smart-stupids. What have you found, Mr. T.?

Tortoise: The grounds are excellent! [electrical grounds]

(4) Tortoise: ...Say, Achilles, what's the story with our coffee? Achilles: The grounds are excellent! [coffee grounds]

(5) Achilles: ...What I find so fascinating about this particular print is that not only the figures, but also —

Author: The grounds are excellent! [figure-ground]

78 David Moser

A straightforward translation obviously will not work here, since this would yield five different sentences in the target language, and thus the playful isomorphism with the fugal form would be lost. In the original, the situations that precede, and justify, each instance of the phrase in question are there exclusively to provide an appropriate context for each of the five different meanings of the phrase, and thus can be rather freely replaced or modified to allow for the use of a similarly ambiguous phrase in the target language. Our task, then, was to find a phrase in Chinese with at least five rather distinct meanings, and then to rework this section of the dialogue to accommodate those meanings in some way, while leaving as much of what was deemed essential to the rest of the dialogue intact.

The solution we came up with was the phrase "Gāodī wǒ yě bu qïngchu" ( ), which can have several meanings, the primary one being 'I'm not too clear about the height.' (Throughout this paper I will follow the con­vention of first giving the pinyin Romanization for the Chinese characters fol­lowed by the characters themselves for the benefit of those literate in Chinese.) The ambiguity here involves the word gâodī ("high-low"), which has several meanings such as "height", "rank", "sense of propriety", and so on.

In the coffee-making scenario, we were able to smoothly incorporate this new phrase into the dialogue without tampering with the original situation too much. We simply had one of the characters ask 'Which shelf do you keep the coffee on?', in which context the reply Gāodī wǒ yě bu qïngchu has the meaning T m not sure if it's on the higher shelf or the lower one'. In other places, however, we had to invent a completely new scenario to provide a context for the phrase. In doing this, we were not only permitted but encouraged by the author to include new elements or jokes in the dialogue whenever the context seemed to allow for it, as long as the style and flow of the new passage seemed consistent with the rest of the dialogue.

For example, we had one of the characters trip over a bush during a tour of the garden, thus providing a context for the phrase Gâodï wǒ yě bu qïngchu (here meaning T wasn't sure about its height'). The reason for his confusion, another character tells him, is that the garden was designed by an eccentric Dutch gar­dener, who delighted in using perceptual tricks and optical illusions to arrange the flowers and shrubbery in such a way that one cannot accurately ascertain their height. (The eccentric Dutch gardener, of course, is supposed to evoke the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, whose etchings exploit all manner of perceptual tricks of perspective.) This brief scenario was not part of the original. Given the fact that we had to devise new contexts to allow for the five repetitions of the same phrase, we were also free to add whatever embellishments seemed appropriate in order to further enliven the Chinese translation.

The Six-Part Ricercar dialogue is modeled very closely on the Bach fugue of the same name, and the above example — just one of dozens of problems that arose in the translation of the dialogue — is typical of the kind of reconstruction process that was necessary throughout the book.

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 79

Problems engendered by the difference between writing systems

The book is filled with acronyms, acrostics, and phrases in which the first let­ter of each word is somehow important, the most salient example of the latter cat­egory being the title of the book itself: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. (Hofstadter includes numerous allusions to this title in the text, such as a reference to an imaginary book entitled Giraffes, Elephants, Baboons: an Equato­rial Grasslands Bestiary, and phrases of his own invention such as "Giant Elec­tronic Brain".) This sort of device is easily reproducible in other languages that use an alphabet, of course. The French translation of the title is Gödel, Escher, Bach: les Brins ďune Guirlande Eternelle, and in German we have Gödel, Escher, Bach: ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band. Similarly, an acronym in the book such as "GOD", which stands for "GOD Over Djinn", can, with a little ingenuity, be translated into any language with an alphabet. (Note that this is a recursive acronym, meaning that the first word of the expanded acronym is again the acronym itself, 'GOD', which can be expanded once again, yielding 'GOD Over Djinn Over Djinn', etc. on to infinity — and this potentially infinite nesting must be preserved in the translation.) Thus we have, in French, 'DIEU', which recur­sively expands to 'DIEU Inspirant l'Esprit Universel'. The German solution was 'ZEUS', which expands to 'ZEUS Ewig Ueber Schinn'. (The slight differences in the translations here are due to the fact that the most important consideration was to come up with a reasonable acronym having the general sense of the original, the specifics being negotiable. Interestingly, the 'translation' into Dutch was identical to the English — 'GOD Over Djinn' — all three words being both English and Dutch and having the same meanings in both languages.)

How does one go about recreating the effect of this kind of wordplay in Chinese? Chinese has no alphabet, of course.3 Each Chinese character is a unique typographic entity standing for one monosyllabic morpheme of the Chinese lan­guage. Furthermore, unlike Roman letters, each Chinese character has a mean­ing, which sometimes roughly corresponds to an entire English word, sometimes to a word component such as '-ly', '-ness', 'un-', 're-', or '-able'. Although most characters are composed of two or more component parts, those parts are usually characters themselves or semantic units — there simply is nothing in the Chinese written language that corresponds to purely syntactic, meaningless atoms like the letters of the Roman alphabet. (This feature of alphabets is what allows one to take, for example, the first letters of the words in the phrase 'Mutual Assured Destruction' and come up with the acronym 'MAD', a word whose meaning has nothing to do with semantics of the individual words in the phrase it stands for. It is impossible to do this in Chinese.) So one of our first problems in tackling each of the acronyms and acrostics in the book was determining what should play the role of a letter and what should correspond to a word.

80 David Moser

The question of what constitutes a word in Chinese is actually a somewhat complex issue in and of itself. The Chinese have traditionally considered the basic linguistic unit to be the character, or zi which is a reasonable perception, given the fact that one syllable always corresponds to one character. Contact with West­ern linguistic theory led the Chinese to import the useful notion of 'word' as opposed to 'single character', but the word for 'word', cí is still somewhat of a technical term to many Chinese (just as the word "morpheme" is to most English speakers), and only the young and well-educated consistently make the distinc­tion. Most Chinese, if confronted with a new word made up of two characters, will ask 'What do those two characters (zi) mean?' rather than "What does that word (cí) mean?"

Some characters can exist either in isolation as semantic units (such as the character rén A , 'person') or in combination with another character or group of characters in compounds, two examples being rénkǒu 'population', (liter­ally 'people mouth[s]') and Zhōngguó rén 'Chinese person', (literally 'Middle-country person'). While it is probably obvious to most Chinese that rénkǒu, 'population' is to be considered as one word, it is not a priori clear whether zhōngguó rén corresponds to one English word ('[a] Chinese'), or two words ('China' + 'person'). Some characters are never used in isolation, such as the characters hú and dié which are found exclusively in the compound húdié meaning 'butterfly'.

It is not always clear what constitutes a word in English either, of course, as is evidenced by the varying degrees of semantic binding in items like 'lightbulb', 'light switch', 'light-year', 'Light Brigade', 'light opera', 'lighthouse', 'starlight', 'electric light', 'flashlight', 'strobe light', 'light up', 'light into', etc. Whether or not these lexical items are classified as one word or two depends on a host of semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and historical considerations. Where word boundaries lie is even less clear to Chinese readers, who are looking only at rows of single characters with nothing corresponding to the spaces between words in a page of English text.

One of the first solutions we came up with to the problem of acronyms was to arbitrarily consider every character to play the role of a word, in which case one of the components of the character could stand for the entire word. Most Chinese characters, after all, are merely groupings of several elements, each of which, when printed full size, is often a character in its own right. For example, the character for 'stir-fry', chǎo , is composed of two elements. The component on the left is the character for 'fire', huo , and is called the 'signific' — the compo­nent that gives some clue as to the meaning of the character. On the right is a phonetic component, the character shâo , (meaning 'few') which only gives an approximate idea of how the character is to be pronounced. (Not all characters have this 'meaningful radical + phonetic component' structure, but in those that do the phonetic component is usually only mildly so.) In an acronym, then, the

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 81

character huo could be used to stand for the more complex character châo and could be used in some way in combination with other characters. Note that breaking up the characters in this way still does not yield mere syntactic units cor­responding to letters, but at least there would be a clear correspondence between words and characters, as well as between letters and character components, which would enable us to make a stab at translating the acronyms.

There were, however, two problems with this proposed technique. First of all, the components in a character are not always conveniently arrayed from left to right, as in the above example. Many characters have their components arrayed from top to bottom as in this character: , or have one component inside another, as in this character: . Components can be combined in any number of complex ways, which would make it very difficult for readers to ascertain which component was meant to stand for the whole. The other problem was simply that Chinese people do not use this convention, so making use of it would entail so much tedious explanation and clarification that in the long run the lighthearted effect of the original would be spoiled.

Fortunately, it turns out that there is a common linguistic practice in Chinese that in some ways approximates an acronym. Long official titles are often abbreviated by taking the first character of each salient linguistic chunk and put­ting those characters together to make a shortened name. For example, the name for Peking University, Běijing Dàxué, is often shortened to Běidà. This is equiva­lent to the kind of process that turns 'California Institute of Technology' into 'Cal-tech'.

This turned out to be the solution we were looking for, though in some cases solutions were still made difficult by the inevitable fact that the characters stand­ing for larger linguistic chunks still retain some of the semantics of the chunk. Nevertheless, we were able to come up with some very workable translations of the original wordplay. Our solution to the 'GOD' acronym is zàowùshén

(literally 'create-things-god'), which expands to zàowùshén wùsède zhòngshénguài ( ), and means 'the numerous genies [djinns] recruited by god'. The acronym expands recursively thus:

'creator-god' '-recruited-by [adj.] + numerous' 'genies'

'creater-god' '-recruited-by + numerous' 'genies' '-recruited-by + numerous' 'genies'

82 David Moser

Note that, as in the original English acronym, the expansions of the acronym are grammatically nested so that the result is always capable of being parsed — The numerous genies [djinns] recruited by god', expands further to 'the numerous genies recruited by the numerous genies recruited by god' and so on. The phrase reads literally, '[by]-god-recruited numerous genies' — zàowùshén ('god'), wùsède zhòng ('-recruited [adj.], numerous'), shénguài

('genies').

Cultural problems

Though China has been absorbing influences from the West at an amazing rate since the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese culture remains in many ways as remote from American culture as the Chinese language is from English. A host of concepts and public figures used in the book as examples — jukeboxes, Muzak, slinkies, Shirley MacLaine, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and so on — had to be replaced by examples more familiar to the Chinese public when the pas­sage in question was merely illustrative, and thus not worth the trouble of elabo­rate explanations or footnotes.

For example, in a section of the book entitled "The Nature of Evidence", there is the following passage:

"What is evidence?" is not just a philosophical question, for it intrudes into life in all sorts of places. You are faced with an extraordinary number of choices as to how to interpret evidence at every moment. You can hardly go into a bookstore (or these days, even a grocery store!) without seeing books on clairvoyance, ESP, UFO's, the Bermuda Triangle, astrology, dowsing, evolution vs. creation, black holes, psi fields, biofeedback, trans­cendental meditation... (Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 695)

Some of the notions in this passage are somewhat familiar to Chinese readers, while others are totally unknown in China. Translating the entire list would involve elaborate footnotes or digressive explanations that would defeat the pur­pose of the example, which was meant merely to bring up some familiar examples of superstitious or questionable belief systems in order to make a point about evi­dence. In addition to this problem, none of the beliefs and notions in this passage that are familiar in China have comparable large numbers of believers there; this particular set of questionable notions is pretty much indigenous to the West, and some to the United States in particular. Given our translation strategy, the solu­tion to the problem would be to replace this list with an analogous list of fringe beliefs indigenous to China — ideas or systems of thought that exude a similar aura of mystery or 'flakiness' and that claim a substantial number of hardcore believers.

This proved somewhat more difficult than I thought it would. Since 1949, the translators informed me, the government has made a concerted effort to rid the

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 83

culture of superstitious notions and beliefs. The Chinese book industry is nothing like the laissez-faire publishing environment of the West, where books on all sorts of supernatural phenomena are freely published and distributed. In China, such books are officially banned or hard to find, I was told, and at any rate, people have little time for such nonsense. To be sure, many uneducated peasants still hold traditional superstitious notions and misconceptions that literate urban Chinese find unscientific or quaint, but it seems that there are actually few super­natural beliefs that have anything like the kind of following that say, tarot cards have in the West. I was somewhat incredulous that people's natural inclination to believe in such supernatural things could be so effectively squelched by the gov­ernment, but we resigned ourselves to finding at least one good example for inclu­sion in the passage.

A few days after the work session in which we discussed this problem, I remembered that several Chinese people I had met professed a belief or at least an interest in the Chinese pseudo-science of qigong. This is a system of deep-breathing exercises that supposedly enables a person to summon and control their qi, their 'life essence', and to perform miraculous feats of strength, or even to heal diseases. My impression was that qigong had a fairly large number of practition­ers, and the next time I met with the translators, I suggested to them that this might be a perfect analogue to the Western beliefs in the passage about the prob­lem of evidence.

"But qigong isn't like that at all!" protested one of them, "Qigong really does work. I've seen it!" I was a bit taken aback. But of course, this cultural difference was merely an instance of exactly the kind of problem of evidence Hofstadter was talking about in the passage. What counts as a questionable or 'flaky' belief in one culture can often be a respectable mainstream belief in another. Many people in the West would not hesitate to put acupuncture in the same category as faith heal­ing, voodoo, or EST, but the efficacy of acupuncture (at least for some things) is pretty much beyond question in China. Therefore, to make the 'same' point in the translated passage, we had to choose our examples rather carefully, even leaving out certain examples that the author himself would have gladly included in a list of questionable beliefs.

Our policy of making the examples as easily understandable as possible usu­ally involved somewhat subtler changes. At one point in the book is the following passage:

A number theory problem, once stated, is complete in and of itself. A real-world problem, on the other hand, never is sealed off from any part of the world with absolute certainty. For instance, the task of replacing a burnt-out light bulb may turn out to require moving a garbage bag; this may unexpectedly cause the spilling of a box of pills, which then forces the floor to be swept so that the pet dog won't eat any of the spilled pills, etc. etc.(Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 569)

84 David Moser

In this passage we changed 'pet dog' to 'baby', not because the Chinese don't know about pet dogs, but simply because the Chinese don't keep dogs as pets. Though they are certainly aware that in other cultures people raise dogs, the Chinese, for public health reasons and because of scarce resources, do not have this custom. This was one of the first passages we dealt with after my arrival, and the translators I was working with at first objected to the change. "Chinese read­ers would still understand the passage perfectly well," they said, "and thus, in the interests of faithfulness to the original text, shouldn't we leave it as is?"

One of China's most famous translators, Yán Fù on (1854-1921), listed three criteria for good translation — xin, dá and yâ ( ), 'fidelity', 'readability', and 'elegance'. These three principles, especially the first one, have had great exemplary importance in China, a country that has spent much of the twentieth century hungrily absorbing foreign ideas and influences from translated works. To be sure, with the demand for foreign books being as great as it is, plenty of hack translation goes on in the People's Republic, and sometimes great liberties are taken with a text in order to make the translation more palatable to Chinese readers, or more acceptable to Chinese censors. But because of the importance of the Gödel, Escher, Bach translation project, it seemed inconceiv­able to the translators that I would so cavalierly suggest that we take liberties, however small, with the original text. We were all concerned with producing a faithful translation, of course. The issue was, what constitutes 'faithfulness'?

My contention was that the change from 'pet dog' to 'baby' should be made precisely in the interest of faithfulness. Obviously the original example had been constructed to be absolutely mundane and easily-imaginable, and this quality of the example mattered more than any specific element within it. What Hofstadter wouldn't want is for Chinese readers to have to think 'Pet dog? Oh yes, in America they have pet dogs.' If the passage in question had been in the context of a novel, where the cultural context is usually an essential aspect, then, of course, any changes of this kind should probably be resisted. Here, however, the intent of the example dictates transplanting the situation to Chinese soil as much as possi­ble, and the Chinese translators soon agreed to adopt this general strategy.

Such transplantation was not always possible, of course, and sometimes situa­tions left in their American context gave rise to interesting problems, especially in the rare cases where the original passage involved some aspect of Chinese culture transplanted to American soil. In one of the dialogues, for instance, two of the characters — the Tortoise and Achilles — are eating in a Chinese restaurant (a Chinese restaurant in the United States, of course). At one point, the Tortoise orders some tea from the waiter, and then the two open their fortune cookies. On the slip of paper in Achilles' fortune cookie is written a cryptic haiku, which the two attempt to decipher.

At first glance this is a seemingly straightforward translation task, but we ran into several snags. In keeping with Hofstadter's policy that the translation should

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 85

read easily and be as free of foreign-seeming things as possible, the translators suggested that we might change the tea to some other drink. The reason is that the Chinese don't drink tea in restaurants. This is probably surprising to some Wester­ners, for whom eating Chinese food and drinking tea seem as inseparable as the concepts of yin and yang. In fact, though, restaurants in China provide beer, soda pop, and sometimes a variety of wines or other alcoholic beverages, but tea is a rather mundane drink which is sipped all day long at home or at work — not something anyone would want to indulge in when eating out.

The second somewhat surprising problem here is that the Chinese have abso­lutely no idea what a fortune cookie is. The custom of serving fortune cookies at the end of a Chinese meal is an American invention, and probably was the result of Chinese immigrants in the United States concocting a dessert based on certain customs they remembered from China. Some say the idea for the fortune cookie goes back to the Yuan Dynasty, in the twelfth century, when the Mongols invaded and ruled over China. During the revolts against Mongol rule, rebels passed secret messages inside of mooncakes — a kind of sweet half-moon-shaped holiday dessert. There were also ancient Chinese parlor games in which players would write clever sayings on scraps of paper and insert them into twisted cakes some­what resembling modern fortune cookies.

Whatever the origin, the custom is not something Chinese readers on the mainland are likely to be familiar with. Luckily for us, a brief explanation of the custom is in the dialogue itself, since Achilles didn't seem to know what a fortune cookie is, either. A bigger problem was finding the term for 'fortune cookie' in Chinese — none of the translators knew it. The person to ask would be a waiter or waitress in a Chinese restaurant in, say, San Francisco's Chinatown, but the word they would give us would most likely be in Cantonese, not Mandarin. We ultimately found out the answer — qianyûbîng , 'written-words cookie' — by asking someone who had worked for a time in a Chinese restaurant in America.4

The last (and mildly surprising) problem with the passage was that most mainland-Chinese readers have never heard of haiku. Perhaps this fact is surpris­ing only if one assumes that, because Chinese and Japanese culture have histori­cally been closer to each other than to Western culture, anything about Japanese culture that is familiar to us must perforce be familiar to the Chinese as well. How­ever, our knowledge of haiku might be simply the result of the historical accident that at sometime in the past, American school teachers adopted the haiku form as an easily-teachable poetic model.

The issue of the role one culture plays in another culture often arose when foreign-language examples were used, as in the following passage:

Although we should recognize the depth to which culture affects thought, we should not overstress the role of language in molding thoughts. For instance, what we might call two "chairs" might be perceived by a speaker

86 David Moser

of French as objects belonging to two distinct types: "chaise" and "fauteuil" ("chair" and "armchair"). ...It is not the difference in native language, but the difference in culture... that gives rise to this perceptual difference.(Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 377)

Since French is a foreign language for both Chinese speakers and English speakers alike, and since Chinese also lacks the 'chaise/fauteuil' distinction, it might seem that the obvious thing to do would be simply to translate the passage into Chinese, leaving 'chaise' and "fauteuil" in French, with a translation added, as in the original. However, readers who compare the Chinese translation with the English original might be surprised to find that we changed the example to 'gloves' (in Chinese) instead of 'chair', and that the language referred to is English rather than French, so that the second sentence of the passage, when backtranslated, reads:

For instance, what we call two "gloves" [shôutào ] might be perceived by a speaker of English as objects belonging to two distinct types: "gloves" and "mittens". ["Gloves" and "mittens" left in English.]

Why the switch? In the original, the author chose make this point using a French example at least in part because French is probably the foreign language most familiar to well-educated native speakers of English in the United States, and thus many of the book's readers would already have some familiarity with the linguistic distinctions he is dealing with. We asked ourselves: what language is to Chinese as French is to English? The answer is English, of course. Given the great amount of emphasis placed on the learning of English, many educated Chinese readers would probably have come across this 'glove/mitten' distinction at some point — or, if not, they would at least have an English-Chinese dictionary handy in which to look the words up.

The problem of translating computer-generated text

Translation of computer-generated text presents problems of a more philo­sophical nature. The dialogue entitled SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing is a ver­batim transcript of an exchange between artificial-intelligence researcher Terry Winograd and his program SHRDLU, which answers questions about objects in a 'micro-world' of toy blocks. (The title of the dialogue is intended to evoke the title of the Bach cantata movement popularly known in English as Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.) Winograd's purpose in creating SHRDLU was to see how well a com­puter could be made to parse and produce natural-language utterances in the well-defined and semantically highly restricted context of a simulated blocks world. The language that SHRDLU was programmed to handle was English, and the dialogue is extensively annotated with comments about specific grammatical con­structions and ambiguities that his program successfully parsed and responded to. Given the language-dependent nature of this dialogue, it would at first seem that

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 87

translating it would not only be somewhat at odds with its illustrative purpose, but would also be, strictly speaking, impossible to carry out. What sense would it make to translate the dialogue into Chinese, which has a very different set of lin­guistic problems?

Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that what the dialogue mainly illustrates (in the context of Gödel, Escher, Bach, at least) is not how well SHRDLU could handle English, but rather how well a sophisticated computer program can handle natural language. Since the problems faced by a computer in handling any given language, though differing in specific details, would be similar to the kinds of problems encountered in handling human languages in general, it seemed reasonable to actually reconstruct the dialogue in Chinese, concocting a number of new sentences that would bring up grammatical issues specific to Chinese but analogous to the problems encountered by SHRDLU in the English dialogue. Had the dialogue been included in a technical paper on the subject of SHRDLU, one would have no choice but to leave the dialogue in English and pro­vide a comprehensive gloss in Chinese for those who couldn't read the English. This is because in that context, the dialogue would constitute data, and translating the program's output into another language would seriously misrepresent those data. For the purpose of our translation, however, this consideration was of lesser importance, and so we devised an analogous dialogue between a Chinese speaker and a fictitious program that could handle Chinese. In this way, Chinese speakers can more easily get a feel for the issues of computer-understanding of natural lan­guage without having to wade through many dozens of subtleties in a foreign lan­guage.

Though it was in the interests of the translation project to similarly translate every instance of computer-generated text, we always experienced a vague sense of unease in doing so. The reason for this touches upon some of the issues raised in the book itself — for example, issues of whether or not a machine can be con­scious.

No one objects to the quote marks around the phrase T think, therefore I am', even though, strictly speaking, Descartes did not write these words. He hap­pened to have written the statement in Latin (Cogito, ergo sum), but he could just as well have written it in his native French, or in any language he was familiar with, and we would still not hesitate to call it the 'same statement'. The reason that quotation marks are acceptable even for translations of this aphorism is first that we ascribe intentionality to Descartes — he meant something by what he said; and second, the meaning of the phrase is somewhat language-independent. We feel comfortable saying that Descartes wrote T think, therefore I am' because we are confident that the English phrase captures the essential meaning of the origi­nal Latin (and, it goes without saying, of that particular thought in the mind of Descartes).

88 David Moser

One might feel somewhat more uncomfortable translating a phrase originally generated by a computer because it seems there is less justification in ascribing intentionality to the computer — the computer could not possibly have meant any­thing by its output. One's intuition is that the computer produced that exact string of letters and nothing more, and thus that it would border on intellectual dishon­esty to translate a computer-generated sentence, since the original was actually nothing more than a string of symbols spat out by the computer according to a set of deterministic and purely syntactic procedures.

But is this intuition a valid one? Of course, this is precisely where some of the central ideas of Gödel, Escher, Bach come into play in the process of its transla­tion. How much intentionality is it reasonable to ascribe to a program like SHRDLU? Can it be said to have at least a simple representation of its blocks world in its 'head'? Is it reasonable to say that it 'understands' the questions put to it, at least in some very limited sense? Presumably the more inclined one is to answer 'yes' to these questions, the less likely one is to object to a translation of the dialogue.

A similar reconstructive job had to be done on a dialogue between two far less sophisticated computer programs that were made to converse in English. The two programs are Joseph Weizenbaum's 'Doctor' program (which was designed to simulate the neutral questioning of a psychiatrist using 'nondirective therapy'), and Kenneth Colby's 'Parry' program (which was supposed to simulate the irra­tional belief system of a paranoid). The two programs do not really understand and respond to English questions, of course, but merely rely on clever heuristics and a large repertoire of canned responses to give the illusion of understanding. The programs were designed to converse with humans, who are often fooled (by the shrewd techniques used by the programmers) into ascribing far more under­standing to the computer than is actually there. The mechanical nature of the two programs is, however, humorously revealed in the following exchange, which took place when the Parry program and the Doctor program were pitted against each other over a computer network:

Parry: I don't understand your motives. Doctor: Why don't you understand my motives? Parry: Shouldn't I be? Doctor: Why did you say that just now? Parry: That's just the way it is. Doctor: Suppose that's just the way it were not. Parry: So? Doctor: I am not sure I understand you fully. Parry: You harp on the same questions too much. Doctor: What does that similarity suggest to you? Parry: I don't get you. Doctor: Do you wish that you did get I? (Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 599)

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 89

All the same problems of ascribing intentionality to the computer arise here again, of course, and there are additional problems as well, if one is to adopt the strategy of reconstructing the dialogue in the target language. Since the word 'get' in the phrase 'I don't get you' does not, of course, translate into Chinese, and since Chinese lacks the English distinction between T' (subjective) and 'me' (objective), some equivalent exchange had to be constructed that would give some idea of the mechanical nature of the computers responses. The last two lines of our Chinese version of this dialogue, backtranslated, come out thus:

Parry: I'm not too clear about what you mean. Doctor: Do you wish that you were too clear about what I mean?

Notice that we could have simulated the doltish, mechanical quality of the computer by translating the same exchange in another way:

Parry: I don't understand you. Doctor: Do you wish that you did understand you?

This, however, would have misrepresented the sophistication of the original Doc­tor program. It was, after all, capable of noticing such things as the use of the sec­ond-person singular 'you' or the possessive 'your' and dutifully (if mechanically) making the switch to 'T" or "my" in its canned responses. So, although we were free to concoct any set of exchanges that would give the flavor of the original pro­gram's rigid and mechanical responses, our translation had to exhibit the same kind of mechanicalness as the original program had.

How can one translate meaningless passages?

At one point in the book, Hofstadter presents the reader with a set of twelve sentences, three of which were written by human writers, and the rest produced by a sentence-generating computer program he had written. The question for the reader was: which were produced by the computer (and therefore 'nonsense') and which were produced by a human being (who was presumably attempting to impart some kind of information to readers)? The nine computer-generated sen­tences are syntactically sound but have an opaque, unnatural quality, as can be seen from the following examples:

Despite the efforts, the reply, if you will, had been supported by the Orient; hence a fallacy will thereafter be suspended by the attitude which will be being held by the ambassador. Of course, until the upheavals, the ambassador was slightly gradually mol­lycoddling the rabble. Although a Nobel Prize was being achieved by the humanists, yet in addi­tion, it was being achieved by the serf.

The human-produced sentences, all culled from a serious British journal called Art-Language, are the following:

90 David Moser

Blurting may be considered as the reciprocal substitution of semiotic mate­rial (dubbing) for a semiotic dialogical product in a dynamic reflexion. Rather think of a pathway of a "sequence" of gedankenexperiment simple­tons where heir-lines are a prima facie case of a paradiachronic transitivity.

When we set about to translate these sentences, the first question the Chinese translators asked me was, of course, "What do these sentences mean, exactly?" — a reasonable question, since translation is a kind of paraphrase (albeit a highly restricted kind). Given the general translation strategy we had already decided on, translation of the nine computer-generated sentences was not quite so much of a problem, since whatever meaning they might have was completely read into the text by the human reader — there was no 'original intent' on the part of the com­puter. Thus, no disservice would be done to these sentences by rendering them as roughly equivalent mixtures of sense and nonsense in the target language. "But what of these three bizarre human-generated sentences?" the translators won­dered. Surely they must have some meaning, convoluted and recondite though it might be. To be fair to the original authors intent as well as to the spirit of Hofstadter's challenge, shouldn't there be at least an attempt to translate the meaning of these sentences?

Even when I was given the chance to see the context of these sentences in the articles in which they appeared, it was impossible for me to adequately paraphrase them, much less translate them. The examples had in fact been chosen by Hofstadter precisely because they represented a kind of language usage that includes highly abstract poetry, dense 'acadamese', highly allusive texts, cryptic in-jokes, and so forth, where the boundary between sense and nonsense can be very blurry for the initiated and uninitiated alike. The very vagueness of this unclear boundary is, of course, one of the reasons computer-generated poetry can be so much fun; one can't help but read all kinds of 'profound' meanings into such pieces, and it is interesting to probe the issue of where these meanings lie.

These questions are provocative enough when raised in the context of English alone, but constitute an even thornier problem when the examples themselves must be pulled out of their cultural and linguistic context and rendered in a lan­guage as remote from English as Chinese is. How does one find Chinese equiva­lents for the Art-Language sentences? One important consideration, of course, is that to an average American, the sentences appear to be impenetrable gibberish, though a special kind of gibberish, written in a hyper-erudite, pretentious, and perhaps even intentionally obfuscatory style, using many low-frequency words and pseudo-scientific jargon. But how far can we go in our attempt to do 'the same thing' in Chinese? Do we go so far as to include characters and phrases from clas­sical Chinese, as one might find in similar recondite passages in Chinese? Or is that going too far? If we were to include classical Chinese, would we still be jus­tified in claiming that these sentences were taken from an British journal called Art-Language, given that it would be so blatantly obvious that the translation must

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 91

be very different from the original? Interestingly, perhaps the best way of preserv­ing the pretentious effect in Chinese would be to leave many of the words in Eng­lish, since liberally sprinkling one's text with English is considered erudite in Chinese (just as the sentences above use foreign words like 'gedankenexperiment' and 'prima facie' for similar effect).

There is not space here to deal with our solutions to these problems, but suf­fice it to say that each translation we came up with raised new, and perhaps ulti­mately unresolvable, difficulties.

The use of English

This last question brings up another interesting issue, namely the possibility of using English in the translation. In principle, of course, it would seem that our goal would be to produce a book as free from English as possible, so that Chinese readers could read it smoothly and easily, almost as if it had been written in Chinese to begin with. But the phrase 'as if it had been written in Chinese to begin with' is an interesting one, since a cursory look at almost any book on a scientific subject written in Chinese will reveal that the pages are peppered with English words and phrases. This is especially true in the domain of computer science, where there are a host of words like 'FORTRAN', 'bit', 'bug', 'hacker', 'crash', 'loop', and so on, all of which, whether or not they have official Chinese transla­tions, are very often left in English. Most Chinese readers familiar with computer science would feel perfectly comfortable with these English terms in the text, and might even be confused by Chinese translations of them. For this reason, it was decided that the instances of computer code in the text (all in BlooP, FlooP, and GlooP — languages Hofstadter created specifically for the book) should be left in English (with explanatory glosses in Chinese), since any computer-literate Chinese reader would already be familiar with the terms used. What all this amounts to is simply that, for many purposes, English has become the lingua franca of computer science — a fact that happens to be invisible when the book is written in English.

Finding the book's essence

The description of Gödel, Escher, Bach — "A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" — which appears on the cover, is not gratuitous. Parts of the book, particularly the dialogues, read more like Alice in Wonderland than a book on artificial intelligence. To translate a book like Alice rather straightforwardly into Chinese (as has been done), preserving only the prin­cipal meaning of all the puns, and including extensive footnotes explaining how the puns work in English, would be of interest only to serious Chinese students of English or to Chinese Lewis Carroll scholars. Such a strategy would seriously vio-

92 David Moser

late the spirit of the original book, which is a classic of whimsy and the playful use of language. The famous linguist Zhào Yuánrèn long ago did a remark­able translation of Alice into extremely idiomatic Chinese, reconstructing the wordplay and puns in such an inventive manner that it was hard to believe that some of the book hadn't actually originated in Chinese. Zhao realized that the essence of the book to a large extent lay in the humor, the play with language, the overall effect of the prose, and he did not hesitate to make numerous local changes in the meaning of the text in order to preserve, globally, the charm of the original in translation.5

Translators of novels routinely have to deal with these kinds of questions, of course; technical translators are rarely confronted with them. Gödel, Escher, Bach contains many kinds of translation problems: parts of the book, such as the dialogues, are more like Alice (demanding creative solutions), others somewhat more like a mathematics textbook (demanding conservative translation). Most of the book floats somewhere between the two extremes, and many of our transla­tion decisions involved determining which passages had mutable content and which did not. Of course, we were helped in our work by the fact that we could consult with the author directly. Not only was Hofstadter not averse to our crea­tive reconstructions, he actually insisted that the translation team adopt this strat­egy.

Hofstadter's view is that the book's 'Platonic essence' — its core ideas and meanings — is a culture-independent structure, and that the English version of the book is by no means a privileged instantiation of this essence. His hope was not only that the Chinese translation (or any translation of the book) should read as effortlessly and naturally as if it had been written in the target language, but also that the metaphors and examples be drawn as much as possible from the Chinese cultural milieu, almost as if the 'Chinese Douglas Hofstadter' had written the book.

One of China's most famous translators was Lín Shū , who was born just a decade after the Opium War ended, and grew up during the end of the Qing Dynasty in the late 1800's, a time when China was experiencing the first shock of being humiliated and exploited by the Western powers. Lin Shu's translations were some of the first channels through which the great works of Western litera­ture flowed into China. In all, he translated over 160 works, including many by Shakespeare, Dickens, Defoe, Hugo, Cervantes, Ibsen, and others, into a beauti­ful literary Chinese that remains a model of clarity and elegance. What makes these translations even more unusual is that the translator could not read or speak any foreign languages — Lin Shu knew only his native Chinese.

His method of translation involved first having someone who knew the lan­guage of the original provide a rough translation into vernacular Chinese, after which he would take that translation and rewrite it in the literary language of the times. This unusual translation method came about in the following way. After the

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 93

death of Lin Shu's wife, mother, and two children in rather quick succession, a friend, in hopes of providing him with a diversion to take his mind off his grief, suggested that they collaborate on a translation of Dumas La Dame aux camélias (known in English as Camille). The young friend produced a straightforward translation of the novel, which Lin Shu turned into a finished product, and the resulting work was such a resounding success that Lin Shu continued to work this way, employing a succession of different collaborators over the course of his remarkable career as a 'translator'. Those who knew both Chinese and the origi­nal language of his translations hailed them as models of faithfulness to the origi­nal text, as well as examples of beautiful writing. Important later writers such as Lao She and Guo Moruo have testified to the influence that Lin Shu's translations had on their artistic development. Attitudes and standards of translation have changed over the years, but Lin Shu's work continues to be fascinating and thought-provoking.

Lin Shu's unusual method can perhaps be counted among the Chinese prece­dents for the translation philosophy we ultimately adopted. Unencumbered by detailed lower-level linguistic considerations, Lin Shu seemed able to grasp the deeper essence of the author's intent and to render it into a Chinese almost com­pletely free of the influence of the original language. Such a method is certainly controversial, of course. It stands translation on its head, so to speak, seemingly downplaying the role of those who actually pulled the ideas from the original lan­guage into a rough Chinese translation. Perhaps most people would be inclined to say that Lin Shu's collaborators were the real translators, and Lin Shu merely polished and edited their work. Yet it is clear that the ability to distill the essence of a work from the host of sometimes incidental or unimportant linguistic consid­erations is one of the most important skills a translator can have.

One aspect of this strategy of capturing the global essence of GEB is seen in our approach to translating the numerous puns and tricks with language. Hofstad-ter's criterion for faithfulness in translating the wordplay was not that each pun in the original have a corresponding pun in the exact same place in the translated text, but rather that the overall density of puns be the same in both languages. This means that we were free to create new wordplay whenever a particularly auspi­cious opportunity arose in the Chinese, and also free to abandon the attempt to translate certain jokes if the ratio of effort to effect seemed too great. The result of this strategy was that often, rather than asking "How can we translate this par­ticular pun into Chinese?", we would ask "How can we translate this passage so that it has the same general flavor as the original?" One can perhaps imagine Lin Shu taking this approach if he were still alive to translate the book. We may not have succeeded as well as he would have, but the level of translation he achieved was our goal at all times.

At any rate, it is clear that not to adopt the more creative reconstructions of the dialogues would have robbed the book of all its zest, rendering it 'like Sze-

94 David Moser

chuan food without the hot pepper', as one of the translators put it. Or, to quote Hofstadter's own unintentional and independently-formulated cultural translation of this remark, 'like Coke without the fizz'.

NOTES

1. Hofstadter was particularly involved with the French translation of the book, and there are two articles that deal with issues involved in that translation project: see Douglas R. Hofstadter, "La recherche de l'essence entre le médium et le message", Protée, Spring 1987, p. 13, and Robert French and Jacqueline Henry, "La traduction en français des jeux linguistiques de Gödel, Escher, Bach", Meta, XXXIII, 3, 1988, p. 331. Both Protée and Meta are Canadian journals.

2. The six characters include: Charles Babbage (1792-1871), an eccentric London inventor whose "Analytical Engine" is often considered the forerunner of the modern computer; Achilles and the Tortoise, two characters used in an allegory by Zeno of Elea (a fifth century Greek philosopher), and later used by Lewis Carroll in a short piece called "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles"; the Crab, a character of Hofstadter's own invention inspired by J. S. Bach's "Crab Canon"; and the author himself, whose appearance in his own dialogue is a Daring And Very Interesting Device, but perhaps inevitable in a book so permeated with self-reference.

3. Those familiar with Chinese language teaching might suppose we would have recourse to using the Roman alphabet, since China has for some time used the Romanization method known as pinyin for teaching Chinese phonetics to both foreigners and Chinese children. Most educated adults are at least marginally familiar with the system, but for a host of reasons, it was decided that pinyin was not useful for our purposes.

4. A woman named Nancy Anderson is now marketing 'Genuine American Fortune Cookies' in Hong Kong and is apparently doing a good business. The Chinese, she says, eat the cookie first and then look at the fortune — exactly the opposite of the American way.

5. Zhào Yuanrèn , (trans.), Àlìsī Mànyóu Qijingjî , Beijing: Commer­cial Press , 1988. See also Warren Weaver's wonderful book, Alice in Many Tongues: the Translations of Alice in Wonderland, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.

About the authors

Douglas HOFSTADTER was born in 1945 in New York City. He is the son of physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Hofstadter, and himself has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oregon. He has held positions at MIT, the University of Michigan, and Indiana Uni­versity, where he is currently a professor in the departments of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Psychology. In addition to Gödel, Escher, Bach, his other books include The Mind's Eye (with Daniel Dennett , 1981), and Metamagical Themas (1985).

David J. MOSER is a writer, musician, and sinologist. He holds a Master's Degree in Chinese from the University of Michigan. He is currently at Indiana University doing research in psycholinguistic aspects of the Chinese language under Douglas Hofstadter at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. Address: 1328 White Str., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104, USA.

Translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese 95

BIBLIOGRAPHY

French, Robert and Jacqueline Henry. 1988. "La traduction en français des jeux linguistiques de Gödel, Escher, Bach", In Meta, XXXIII (3): p. 331.

Hofstadter, Douglas R., 1979. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, New York: Basic Books. 777 pp.

Hofstadter, Douglas R., 1987. "La recherche de l'essence entre le médium et le message". In Protée, Spring 1987: p. 13.

Weaver, Warren, 1964. Alice in Many Tongues: the Translations of Alice in Wonderland. Madi­son: University of Wisconsin Press. 147 pp.

Zhào Yuánrèn ( ), (trans.), Ālìsī Manyóu Qíjingji ( ) , 1988. Beijing: Commercial Press ( ) . 381 pp.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article passe en revue de nombreux problèmes divers posés par la traduction en chinois de Gödel, Escher, Bach de Douglas R. Hofstadter, livre dont le thème central est le rapport entre la démonstration métamathématique de Gödel de l'incomplétude de l'arithmétique et l'esprit, la conscience, et l'intelligence artificielle. Le livre est organisé en dialogues suivis de chapitres techniques ou philosophiques. On y trouve un nombre très important de jeux de mots, d'auto-références, de jeux structurels, de sigles, d'acrostiches, et de relations réciproques entre forme et fond, sans parler de discussions portant sur la prose "non-sensique", sur le textes générés par ordinateur et sur la traduction. L'article commence par une discussion de quelques difficultés de traduction de certains jeux de mots en un système d'écriture non-alphabétique. Le texte de dé­part contient d'innombrables références et d'exemples tirés de la culture américaine qui, tra­duits tels quels, ne seraient nullement compréhensibles par des lecteurs chinois. Par conséquen­ce, les traducteurs ont décidé de les remplacer par des "équivalents" dans la culture chinoise. Les processus qui les ont amenés à leurs choix sont décrits en détail. De plus, chaque dialogue a un caractère "auto-référentiel", c'est-à-dire que sa structure est le plus souvent le reflet de son contenu. Par exemple, la discussion des personnages de l'un des dialogues porte sur les acrosti­ches: il y a donc dans ce dialogue un acrostiche caché au niveau des répliques. Le dilemme tra-ductologique classique se voit surgir: devrait-on garder la structure du dialogue au détriment de son contenu explicite ou l'inverse? Une partie importante de l'article est consacrée à la discus­sion de la fidélité de "haut niveau" (c'est-à-dire, structurelle) d'une traduction par rapport à sa fidélité de "bas niveau" (détails explicites, voire superficiels). Ensuite, sont examinés les pro­blèmes philosophiques posés par la traduction d'un texte produit par ordinateur: en particulier, dans quelle mesure peut-on attribuer un "sens" a un tel texte vu qu'il a été produit par une ma­chine? Cet article commente également les difficultés rencontrées lors des tentatives des traduc­teurs de rendre en chinois les subtilités de certains passages qui frôlent, à la Lewis Carroll, les limites du non-sens ou qui regorgent de termes inventés, d'allusions vagues ou d'expressions compliquées, obscures ou opaques.