Why We Bothered Translating Every Cue Into Chinese
雙語之故
Most bilingual apps translate the interface and leave the teaching in English. That choice quietly decides who the app is for.
Most bilingual apps translate the interface and leave the teaching in English. It looks like a small scoping decision. It quietly decides who the product is for.
The two kinds of bilingual
There is a version of bilingual that means: the buttons say 開始 instead of "Start", the settings page has a language toggle, and the four hundred words of actual instruction remain in English. This is the common case. It is not dishonest, and it costs almost nothing.
The other version means every movement name, every anatomical description, every breath cue and every apex instruction exists in full in both languages. That is a different order of work, and it is the only version that is any use to someone who wants to learn the material in Chinese.
| Interface-only | Full teaching | |
|---|---|---|
| Buttons and menus | Translated | Translated |
| Movement names | Sometimes | Always, with characters |
| Anatomical description | No | Yes |
| Breath cues | No | Yes |
| Apex and key-moment cues | No | Yes |
| Usable by a Chinese-first learner | No | Yes |
Why the direction matters
For this curriculum the source is Chinese. The lineage documents are Chinese; the movement names are Chinese; the technical vocabulary is Chinese. The English is downstream.
That ordering has a practical consequence: when the English is ambiguous, the Chinese resolves it. When an English instruction could be read two ways — and Xuán Dǐng is the standing example, routinely mistranslated into an instruction that makes people tighten their necks — the character says which reading is correct. 懸 means to hang from. There is no version of that character that means push upward.
The English is a translation. The Chinese is the instruction.
The working rule for the curriculum
Terms that do not survive translation
- 懸頂xuán dǐng
- Suspended crownUsually rendered "lift the head", which reverses the mechanic. See the full piece.
- 沉肩chén jiān
- Sinking the shoulders"Relax the shoulders" loses the downward direction. 沉 is the character for a ship sinking.
- 蓮花掌lián huā zhǎng
- Lotus palmA specific tension pattern — index and little finger taut, middle and ring slightly curved. "Cupped hand" describes the shape and loses the instruction. See Hand Shapes.
- 丹田dān tián
- Cinnabar fieldRendered "core" or "belly", which imports gym vocabulary and an anatomical claim the original does not make.
- 虛xū
- Empty, hollow, insubstantialUsed for the hollow armpit, the unweighted leg, and the hollows tapped in Pa Ba Xu. English needs a different word each time and loses the common thread.
Who it is actually for
Three groups, and they want different things from the same feature.
- Chinese-first practitioners, for whom an English-only teaching layer means the product simply is not for them.
- Heritage learners — often second-generation, often with conversational but not technical Chinese — who want the terminology because the terminology is part of what they are reaching for.
- Serious Western practitioners who have realised that the English literature on this material is thin, inconsistent and frequently wrong, and who want to check what the source says.
The third group is larger than expected. Anyone who has tried to reconcile three English books on the same set has run into the problem: they disagree, and there is no way to adjudicate without the characters.
What it cost
Roughly sixty-nine movements across the programs, each with a name, a description, a breath cue and an apex cue. Every one of those exists in both languages. The Zen Gong descriptions run to several hundred characters each and include anatomical detail — degrees of rotation, distances in centimetres, named points.
It is slow work and it does not demo well. Nobody screenshots a breath cue. The reason to do it anyway is that it is the part a competitor cannot copy: the English can be paraphrased in an afternoon, and the lineage translation cannot.