One of the first problems I noticed with quốc ngữ translations is that they add the words “China” (nước Tàu or Trung Quốc) or “in China” (ở bên Tàu, etc.) when no such terms exist in the originals.
Let’s look, for instance, at Ngô Thì Sĩ’s (Ngô Thời Sỹ) late-eighteenth-century Model Cases of Việt History (Việt Sử Tiêu Án). This work was translated by the Hội Việt Nam Nghiên Cứu Liên Lạc Văn Hóa Á Châu and published in Saigon in 1960.
In this translation we can find the following simple sentence: “Nước ta bị ngoại thuộc vào nước Tàu từ đời Hán đến đời Đường.”
We could translate this sentence as “Our country was forcefully incorporated into China from the Han to the Tang.”
“Forcefully incorporated into China” is probably not the best translation for “bị ngoại thuộc vào nước Tàu,” but I think it captures the feeling. By using the term “bị” the translator is making it clear that “our country” was acted upon in a negative way.
What sentence is this a translation of? It is a translation of this sentence: “Ngã bang nội thuộc, lịch Hán ngật Đường (我邦内屬, 歷漢迄唐).”
Ok, so we have numerous problems here. First of all, there is no “China” (nước Tàu) in the original. Second, there is no “bị” in this sentence either.
The third problem is with the term “nội thuộc.” Admittedly this is a difficult term to translate, but it is difficult because it refers to a way of thinking that is unfamiliar to us. It is a term which was created by Chinese, and it literally means to “internally belong.” Keith Taylor has translated it as “belong inside.”
The idea behind it is that the Chinese court was at the center, and that other kingdoms and polities that submitted to its authority and jurisdiction then “belonged inside.”
So this is a Sino-centric term, and to our modern sentiments it seems arrogant, but there is nothing in Ngô Thì Sĩ’s sentence to indicate that he felt as we do today. He simply stated what he saw to be a fact, that from the Han to the Tang, his domain had “belonged inside.” It had been under the jurisdiction and administration of the Central Court.
So how can we translate this sentence? Well, again, “nội thuộc” is difficult to render into English, but something like the following might work: “Our domain belonged inside from the Han to the Tang” (with a footnote explaining what “belonged inside” means) or “Our domain was under internal jurisdiction from the Han to the Tang” (with a footnote explaining what “under internal jurisdiction” means).
Whatever terms one chooses, the feeling of the above translations, like the original, is very different from “Our country was forcefully incorporated into China from the Han to the Tang.”
As such, “Nước ta bị ngoại thuộc vào nước Tàu từ đời Hán đến đời Đường” is a horrible translation of this sentence. It does a beautiful job of projecting the views of modern Vietnamese in 1960 back into the pre-modern past. But if you really want to understand that past, then this sentence, like countless others in quốc ngữ translations, is an obstacle, not an aide.
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I just looked through a dissertation by a student of Victor Liberman. The PhD candidate defended his dissertation last year, which studies the history basically of the Nguyen family in the 16-18th centuries. The student said he reads Vietnamese, English, French, some Spanish and Portuguese sources during his research. He also read many many different versions of all Vietnamese translation of the Han-Nom texts such as Dai Viet su ky toan thu, Dai Nam thuc luc, Nam trieu cong nghiep dien chi, etc. While i cant point out the evils of “Vietnamese translation” as you did here, I really surprise that he got a PhD degree in an American university by reading Vietnamese translation of all kinds of primary sources.
P/S: I start to think that it was too much to say “the evils of Quoc ngu” — 1) Quoc ngu was used to refer to Nom script also. 2) Quoc ngu (even the romanized form) is not bad. But Vietnamese really have to try hard to develop tieng Viet so that they can use Quoc ngu/ tieng Viet to provide better translation of Han-Nom texts from the past.
And yes, the expression “the evils of quoc ngu” is not really accurate. What I really mean is “the evils of bad translations.”
I don’t think people need to “develop tieng Viet.” What they need to do is to develop a more accurate understanding of the past. People who can read Han and translate into modern Vietnamese need to think in more sophisticated ways about how the way people thought in the past was different from the way we think now, and they need to be much more careful to not use ideas from the present to translate ideas from the past.
For this to happen, people need to understand how ideas have changed. This is critical. It is in the early 20th century that everything started to change, but many of the sources which show this have not been studied, translated, or written about by people. So people don’t see how things have changed.
People need to know what was there before, how it changed, and how people think now. With that knowledge, then they can “develop tieng Viet” to express more clearly what old texts actually say.
Yea, this is a major problem. It is a basic requirement of professional historical scholarship that scholars read primary sources IN THEIR ORIGINAL FORM. Basing a phd dissertation on translations is NOT ACCEPTABLE.
No one in the US can possibly get a phd dissertation passed if they use modern French translations of Latin sources, for instance. And yet a dissertation based on modern Vietnamese translations of classical Chinese sources is ok. That’s ridiculous.
It’s very common for historians to have to learn multiple languages, and even multiple classical languages. For decades historians of ancient “Western” history have had to learn ancient Greek, Latin, French, etc.
But asking someone to learn classical Chinese so that they can study pre-modern Vietnamese history? No no no, we can’t demand that. . .