Language Log

Note to Sinologist colleagues:

For the last few years, I've been noticing that Chinese archeologists
and scientists publishing in English consistently refer to jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 as
"oracle bone scripts" (note the plural), when I think they mean "oracle
bone inscriptions" or "oracle bone texts".

I'm wondering if I should make an attempt to correct this usage, or
whether it is so well entrenched in Sino-English that nothing can be
done to change it.

For those who don't know what "Chinese Text Project" (CTP) is, here's a:

Brief introduction:

The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also the largest database of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.

You may wish to read more about the project, view the pre-Qin and Han, post-Han or Wiki tables of contents, or consult the instructions, FAQ, or list of tools. If you're looking for a particular Chinese text, you can search for texts by title across the main textual sections of the site.

(from the CTP homepage)

Air Force billboard in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China:

Courtesy of The Great Translation Movement (TGTM) — here.

New book in the Cambridge Elements Series
Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair
Early Globalism and Chinese Literature
Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2026 

The entire book, richly illustrated in color, is available open access online.

Summary

Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture.

This is a story about the love between a man and a woman who don't know each other's language and haven't learned it either.  The man is an American from New Haven, and the woman is a Chinese from Xi'an, China.  He speaks English and she speaks Mandarin.  They converse through Microsoft Translator.

They met in Xi'an in 2019 when the man went to see the sights (Terracotta warriors, Buddhist temples, and so on).  After he came back to America, they continued to communicate through messaging.  But then Covid struck and they were cut off from each other.  After Covid restrictions were relaxed, she decided to come to America in 2022 on a one-way ticket and stayed here.

From Barbars Phillips Long:

A Reddit thread beginning with a complaint from a student taking Spanish at a U.S. high school hinges on whether the teacher should call the student by his preferred name in English or translate it into Spanish. I never really thought about the practice of using or assigning Spanish names in Spanish class, or French names in French class, even though I did not have a French name in French class (possibly because my junior high French teacher was Puerto Rican and my high school teacher was a Hungarian refugee who had studied at the Sorbonne). But since I was in high school in the 1960s, sensitivity about names, naming, pronunciation of names, "dead names," and other assorted naming issues are a much more prominent part of advice/grievance columns and forums.

[This is a guest post by Michael Broughton.]

I had an interesting Rorschach encounter with the oracle bone graph for woman a couple of years back. Oddly, this experience came in a rather roundabout way through an investigation into the character for interpretation, yi 譯. At the time, I was starting my Chinese translation business and wanted to come up with a meaningful logo for the business. I thought that an investigation into the character yi 譯 might help to inspire some ideas, and so I tried to do a little bit of digging into why it was written the way it was. Of note, the Liji (Book of Rites) has four characters for interpreting officials, as James Legge wrote in his elegant translation:

To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters (ji 寄); in the south, representationists (xiang 象); in the west, Di-dis (didi 狄鞮); and in the north, interpreters (yi 譯).

As editor of Journal of Chinese History, Sarah Schneewind asked me if I would do a review of this book:  Documents géographiques de Dunhuang.  Having done over three hundred reviews during my career, I try to decline them as much as possible at this stage.  However, I succumbed to her offer because it was about Dunhuang and was by a French author, for both of which I have soft spots in my heart..

Jokingly, I wrote back:  "In honor of your surname in these arctic times, Sarah, I will do the review."

She replied, "Vielen Dank, Victor!  Ganz schön, dass meine Name etwas gilt!"  ("Thank you very much, Victor! It's really nice that my name means something!")

Our colleague and teacher, Prof. Matsumoto Akirō, passed away on January 6, 2026, at 82 years of age.

Prof. Matsumoto graduated from Waseda University in East Asian history in 1966, received his Master’s degree, also from Waseda, in philosophy in 1972, and thereafter studied at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. He taught at International University of Japan and at St. Thomas (Eichi) University and held visiting professorships at Durham University (UK) and the University of Virginia (USA). He originally specialized in Islamic theology, working in Persian and Arabic texts under the mentorship of Prof. IZUTSU Toshihiko (井筒 俊彦) in Japan and Prof. Sayed Jalaluddin Ashtiani at Ferdowsi. His research included the mystical thought of Ibn ‘Arabi, Ibn Sina, Jami, Rumi, and Mulla Sadra and the 20th century Twelver Shi’ism of Ayatollah Khomeini. He also published numerous translations of Persian philosophical works into Japanese.

This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation:  link is embedded here.  As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying.  Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic.  I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.

Post 2/3
Three days after the inferno, the HK NatSec Office brands the fire “以火乱港 2.0” — the exact same phrase they used for 2019 rioters.
Translation: they’re prepping to blame “anti-China forces” so no tycoon or cadre ever sees a courtroom. pic.twitter.com/ndkFLHrCoE

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动 (@TGTM_Official) November 30, 2025

From Mark Swofford:

Here's a lighthearted Google Translate oddity from a newspaper article on the opening of ferry service between Taiwan and Ishigaki, Japan. 

The relevant bit:

選在冬季開航，海象較差船舶易晃，影響旅客搭乘意願。洪郁航表示，首航至明年2月底將採試營運優惠價，最低優惠至2000元，而最大優惠價差高達2000元，提高民眾嘗試及體驗意願。

Notable & Quotable: Lost in Woke Translation
‘Then a black Dutch fashion blogger wrote an article saying that Gorman’s work should only be translated by a black woman.’
Dec. 2, 2025

If we adhered to such a standard for choosing translators, where would it lead?