The rectification of names, from a translator’s desk: when words and things drift apart

In Analects 13.3 a disciple asks Confucius what he would do first if he were given charge of government. "Rectify names," he says. The disciple thinks this is impractical, and Confucius explains, in a famous chain: if names are not correct, speech does not accord with things; then affairs do not succeed; then rites and music do not flourish; then punishments miss their mark; and then the people do not know where to put hand or foot.

I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and we call this chính danh. My working life is spent with names that are not quite correct: words that meant one thing in Paris in 1945 and must mean something slightly different in Hanoi now.

What I find interesting is that the tradition already disagrees with itself about what correcting a name is. In the Analects, it can sound like making people live up to their titles: let the ruler be a ruler, the father a father. In Xunzi's chapter on correct naming, names have no built-in fitness; they are fixed by agreement, and the trouble begins when people disturb the agreements for their own purposes.

So is rectifying names a matter of fitting words to the world, or of keeping a community's agreements stable? And is it a conservative idea, or could it be a radical one: calling an exploitation by its name?