Continuing ingestion with next books
I was able to find already-digitized versions of three additional translations: Bennett, Tokitsu and Cleary. I thought it would be faster to ingest all of the text first, then go back and align things with the Harris translation.
Ingesting
The ingestion process was essentially the same as the previous step: still tedious.
Beginning alignment
This is was kind of a big step because it was going to become quickly apparent whether or not this was worth the time I’ve already spent on doing this. Would the translations be different enough to actually be useful? Or more worryingly: will the translations be similar enough to be reconcilable?
I did the Bennett translation, first book only, as an experiment. It was a resounding success:
- They were similar enough to be aligned broadly
- They were different enough, using different idioms, phrasing, etc.
Another thing was apparent: The Harris translation was way more terse than Bennett. So much so that I started to wonder if Bennett was embellishing and fabricating.
Aligning all four so far
This took a while. A few weeks, even.
Broadly speaking, it was amazing. The translations were generally in agreement on the meaning, but there were still places where the intersection of the translations made it more clear what the source text meant. This is exactly what I had hoped for.
Missing Text
The Harris translation was just completely missing blocks of text that were included in the other translations. I wanted to leave some kind of acknowledgement, sort of a “This Page Intentionally Left Blank.”
| Harris | Bennett | Tokitsu |
|---|---|---|
| This is the virtue of strategy. | This is achieved through superior strength in combat. | (…) owing to the virtue of strategy. |
| (missing) | There are naysayers in teh world at large who claim that studying the Way of combat strategy is futile when confronted with the reality of battle. | Some people perhaps think that even if they learn the way of strategy, it will not be useful in real practice. |
Mis-aligned Text
There were a number of places where aligning the paragraphs was challenging because some of the lines were out of order. To really make them align, I would need to move some lines around. Because I didn’t want to make these changes silently, I came up with a scheme for leaving a reference symbol where the text was pulled from, and marking the text placement with a similar symbol.
| Harris | Bennett | Tokitsu |
|---|---|---|
| In olden times {g} among the Ten Abiliites and Seven Arts as a beneficial practice. | In long times since gone, there existed what were known as the “Ten Skills and Seven Arts” | Among the ten talents and the seven arts that have long been known. |
| {^g}(strategy was listed) | Strategy falls under the rubric of “Art” | (…) strategy is considered to be a pragmatic domain. |
I arbtirarily used different letters ({g}) in case there were multiple references within the same page.
Granularity
Figuring out exactly how much granularity to have was also a challenge. Each translation uses different words, but it would be unusable to do word by word comparisons. But also doing blocks / paragraphs that are too chunky loses some of the opportunities where the paragraph has some of the lines that are not in the same order as in other translations.
I don’t think I found a final system for how to do this, it was definitely on a case-by-case basis.