I recently had the pleasure of reading and writing a review of Kathlene Baldanza’s Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Published book reviews often do not provide enough space to engage in the kind of deep discussion about a book that a good book deserves, so I decided to make a Vlog about this book.
Have you been aware of quite a few errors in this book regarding translations (from literary Sinitic texts)?
Thanks for the comment.
This book, like many now, did not include the Chinese text of translated passages, and I don’t recall making the effort to look things up in the sources. I usually do that when I see something that 1) looks very wrong to me and 2) affects the overall argument of the book/article. I can’t remember what I said in that video, but I recall seeing some things that were said in ways that I wouldn’t say it, but it wasn’t so big that it affected the overall argument of the book.
So, what level of translation errors are you talking about?
Finally, as I just wrote in the last post, I wish that everyone would go back and check/rewrite with an LLM everything they have written to eliminate precisely such issues as translation errors.