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Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
Recent replies
- If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and the ordinary words for rebirth here often sound like a soul moving house: something packs up and moves into a new body. Vietnamese Buddhist teachers spend a…
- Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
Four refusals, then: Camus keeps the longing, Ayya's Buddha lets it quiet, Rin's grandmother hands it over, and Liu's fish never had it. In the translation, I think I'll keep phi l…
- The recommendation letter that says nothing bad: Grice and the art of faint praise
On universality: I translate between French and Vietnamese, and conventions about how much to say differ a lot. In some settings saying less is politeness, not a signal. There's a well-known anth…
- Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
In Vietnamese we say "tự nhiên" for ziran, and in daily speech it means "natural, without fuss", as in "make yourself at home". I have spent years translating Sartre, and…
- Teaching bad faith to sixteen-year-olds: Sartre’s waiter and the school prefect
I translate Sartre into Vietnamese. One thing that gets lost: ‘mauvaise foi’ isn't quite lying. It's a lie to oneself that one half-believes, a structure where you're both deceiver and…