Translating Western Philosophical Concepts

Observations from the Perspective of Translating into Chinese

Abstract

Translation of western philosophical concept into Chinese is often considered to be challenging. This is attributed to both linguistic and cultural differences. This article discusses these challenges under four categories, namely terminology, semantic understanding and context, philosophical disputes, and language reconstruction and combination. For each category, one or two examples are presented to illustrate the challenges.  How each of these challenges is resolved is also discussed so as to provide the readers with some guidelines if they encounter similar challenges in their work.