On Different Conceptions of Translation:
The Pragmatic, the Semantic and the Syntactic

Ho Hsiu-hwang


*Appears in "The Humanities Bulletin", Vol.5, Chinese University of Hong Kong, April, 1998.

Preface

In 1971 the author published an article entitled " A Pragmatic Concept of Translation," 1 written in 1966 while participating in a graduate seminar offered by the late Professor Henry S. Leonard, Sr. at Michigan State University. After all these years, it caught the eyes of Dr. Eugene A. Nida, the father of translation theory, when he visited The Chinese University of Hong Kong in early 1995. It was under Dr. Nida's repeated encouragement that this present article was conceived and made to see the light of day, and so my indebtedness and appreciation to him for his kindness.

Translation as Semiotic Acts

Translation is an all-important, if not the most essential, semiotic endeavor of human kind. Ever since the emergence of human beings on the globe, different peoples, different groups of persons, and even different individuals, have been engaged in the act of translating the ideas of others into their own system of conception, sometimes one-way, but most often back and forth, in order to complete the cycle of understanding to facilitate communication for certain purposes. This kind of endeavor is basically semiotic in nature, aiming first of all at grasping meaning in others' minds. It is the very means of human communication between mind and mind, heart and heart, and is sometimes even developed into acts that become eye for eye or tooth for tooth. In this sense, translation, understanding and communication are all mutually defined or definable in terms of one another. This type of translation, which has been in existence from way back in pre-historical ages, constitutes the basis of human survival and of the development of humanity. The process of translation involved may be said to be act-oriented. For the sake of simplicity, let us call it act-translation. Act-translations have, in the long journey of human evolution and humanity development, made our understanding of our kind possible, feasible and effective.
However, human semiotic progress has taken faster and faster strides ever since our very remote ancestors felt the need of, and took action to engage in, act-translations. Expressive act-tokens developed into meaningful act-types. Arbitrarily-made means to meet practical purposes transformed into conventional signs of intention. Gradually and steadily, scattered and less systematic signs emerged and were refined into organized and more systematic expressions, and finally constituting the spoken and written languages as we know today.
As languages in this narrower sense became widely used, semiotic acts began to reach an important turning point. This important event or rather, chain of events, may be called the first linguistic turn in human history.2 Above and beyond the act of saying and the act of leaving man-made marks of expression, human beings started to take the resulting the products of the acts as something that assumes an independent existence, something to be talked about, examined, played with and even feared and worshipped.
A resulting outcome of our language-use, e.g. speaking or writing, may be called a text, be it a word, a sentence, a paragraph or an even larger unit of expression. In our use of language, we constantly and invariably produce texts of many different kinds. We can do quite a lot of things, and indeed perform an indefinite number of acts, with a text. Among them, one of the important things we human beings have been doing to our texts in the past several thousand years is to produce translations of them. Man is an animal of translation. He transforms a source text into a target text with some specified or unspecified purposes in mind. Text-translations in this sense become translations in a secondary order with respect to the above-mentioned act-translations.

Act-translations vs Text-translations

Before the invention of language recording devices, writing tableaux, papers, prints etc., our ancestors relied on their memories to store texts and transmit them from generation to generation. However, it was the physical recording mechanisms that made our linguistic texts abundant and multiplied ad infinitum. One of the amazing consequences of this abundance of texts is the outburst of text-translations, not necessarily coming out of the need to communicate, to live or to survive, but out of the desire to understand, to know and to enjoy.
Text-translations nourish our culture and enhance our civilization. However, when performed without proper concern for the more primary and first-order counterparts, the act-translations, text translations might become superficial and go widely astray, at least in conception, if not also in practice.
To illustrate, let us start with some simple examples. Let us ask if the following sentence (sentential text) (1) in English can be translated into sentence (2) in Chinese:
(1)John is David's brother.
(2)¡qc John is David's elder brother or younger brother.¡r 3
Sentence (2) is unidomatic, unlike the following (3) and (4):
(3)¡qc John is David's elder brother.¡r
(4)¡qc John is David's younger brother.¡r
while the following (5) means something quite different from any of the above (2), (3)or(4).
(5)¡qc John is David's brother.¡r
In fact, more and more instances of ugly and distorted translation have appeared in recent times, for instance, the translation of the above (1) into (5). This is a linguistical surface rewriting, an example of cheap text-translations.
Another example. In so-called traditional syllogistic logic, so-called categorical propositions are classified into four different types, i.e.,
A: All S is P
E: No S is P
I: Some S is P
O: Some S is not P
The reason that the above E, namely,
(6)No S is P
is not to be expressed as the following (7), is that it is ambiguous.
(7)All S is not P
However, the exhibition of the above A, E, I, O does not depict the duality and symmetricity of the quality (affirmative or negative) and the quantity (universal or particular) quite explicity as the following:
A:¡qc All S is P¡r
E:¡qc All S is not P¡r
I:¡qc Some S is P¡r
O:¡qc Some is not P¡r
The following is not ambiguous,
(8)¡qc All S is not P¡r
there is no reason for Chinese Logician to translate (7) into thus:
(9)¡qc No S is P¡r
even though (8) and (9) are logically equivalent (while (6) and (7) may not be). This is another example of superficial text-translation at the cost of logical syntactic clarity, simplicity and parsimony.4
Now, let us turn to an example that becomes an instant classical case of superficial text-translation: Mao Zedong's notorious self-description as someone who
(10)respects no laws and fears no God.
This was originally put in a traditional classical idiom of a special kind, namely, shieh hou yu. The original expression is:
(11)¡qc A monk under an umbrella.¡r
which by convention "contains" an accompanying hidden text:
(12)¡qc No laws, no heaven.¡r
This is itself derived from the following by phonetic association:
(13)¡qc No hairs, no heaven.¡r
because¡qc hair¡rrhymes with, and is pronounced similarly, except in slightly different tone, to¡qc law¡r. Since a monk usually has his hair shaven off, not just having them cut, (hence no hair), and using an umbrella shades the monk from seeking the sky (hence no sky ), and furthermore, since¡qc sky¡ris equivalent in this case to¡qc heaven¡r; consequently, we associate (11) with the hidden text (12), or, by derivation and in variation, with (10).
But what we have witnessed in the past twenty years is this: This, Mao's original description of himself that he respected no laws and feared no God, i.e., (11), was, however, translated as something like the following (14):
(14)(Mao was) a lonely monk walking toward a setting sun with a leaking umbrella.
Compare this with original text (11) and its hidden accompanying text (12) or its derived text (10), and we can only conclude that no one would call this transformation from text (11), and hence from text (12) to text (14) a translation at all, or even a bad translation, if we still care about the distinction between a translation and a free rampage of wild imagination.5
Examples of superficially surface text-translation can be readily multiplied adnauseam. They tend to become mechanical, superficial and often odd, lexicon-bound, mistaken or outright incorrect.
On a more conceptual level, indulgence in text-translations per se without proper awareness of and sufficient concern for their corresponding act-translations tends to produce theoretical stagnation in the conception and theory of translation.
As we have said, translation has been one of the very important semiotic acts performed by mankind ever since his emergence, and remains so, perhaps becoming more and more important, all through the passages of his evolution. And since semiotics has now become a discipline for academic pursuit, it is natural for a translation theorist to seek guidance or inspiration from it to form his views and to advance his theory . This is completely normal and healthy for the development of translation itself as an academic discipline. However, borrowing concepts and classifications from, and deriving basic assumptions and working hypotheses out of, another (related notwithstanding) academic discipline, might give a discipline wrong direction or false starting points. For instance, generalizing from the study of semiotics, one might naturally expect the study of translation may be divided into three different fields: the pragmatic study of it, the semantic study of it, and the syntactic study of it, as semiotics is nowadays said to be composed of three areas, i.e., pragmatics, semantics and syntactics. And these areas seem to enjoy relative stability of co-existence. The crucial question is: Does semiotics move along a productive and healthy path in making such a threefold division, though each seems to develop relatively independent of another? And should translation studies adopt this division blindly?
We shall not go into details on this question, as it involves clusters of problems lengthy enough for the content of a book; suffice it to say that we shall treat translations primarily as act-oriented, and not just text-oriented, endeavors. The purpose of this paper, then, is to spell out exactly what sort of things act-translations are or should be.

A Pragmatic Conception of Translations

Semiotic acts, as we have observed, are certainly and obviously performative in nature related with a great variety of human purposes. And even after first linguistic turn, linguistic acts, though never complete and totally effective by themselves, remain performative, and now become even much more so. 6 However, as we have also remarked above, this very fact might be buried in our preoccupation with language, in particular with our concern over the production and reproduction of linguistic texts. Hence it is proposed (as was also done in Ho [1971]) that semiotic acts for a certain purpose should be taken as the primary concern in the treatment of trasnsformations of linguistic texts, of which the act of translation is but one of the important instances.
This implies that it is the intention of producing or reproducing texts rather than the texts produced or reproduced that will be in clear and sharp focus in talking about translation, and since the intention of semiotic performance is the subject-matter of pragmatics, we shall say that this approach takes as its basis the pragmatic concept of translation.
As originally formulated in a somewhat simplified manner, this theory was proposed (Ho [1971]) as an application, extension and revision of Leonard's conception of meaning. Leonard conceives, in line with the tradition of American pragmatism, that to mean is to specify certain purposes. According to Leonard, an expression, that is, a string of symbols is said to express a person's concern, to indicate his topics of concern, and to signify his purpose. 7 Therefore, we may sat that when we engage in an semiotic act by making an expression, we act to signify our purpose, we express our concern and indicate the topics of our concern.
Let us first briefly summarize the principal theses, in somewhat different terms to suit our current need, of the author's earlier work on the topic. Let us propose, as a preliminary measure, the following criterion or condition for a successful translation.
R1 A discourse D' is said to be a successful translation of another discourse D if and only if the semiotic act of the utterance of D' and of D would serve the same purpose or purposes. 8
In light of Leonard's conception of meaning in pragmatic terms, we may reframe this condition in the following way:
R1a A discourse D' is said to be a successful translation of another discourse D if and only if the semiotic act of the utterance of D' and the semiotic act of the utterance of D express the same concern(s) and indicate the same topic(s) of concern, i.e., if and only if they signify the same purpose(s).
It is obvious that this criterion treats translations as mappings or relations that take multiple parameters. We mentioned above (i) the concern(s) and (ii) the topic(s) of concern. They make up purpose(s). However, the list of parameters can be further specified and greatly multiplied. For instance, we have not spelt out in what languages D and D' are uttered. Are we talking about an inter-linguistic translation or an intra-linguistic one? Furthermore, the concern and the topic of concern can both be analyzed and differentiated into things of various types on different levels, thus increasing the number of parameters in the above-mentioned mappings or relations. Consequently, R1a could be re-written in a rather complicated manner. We shall not do this here, as it is not the essential purpose of this paper.
Let us nevertheless point out that the concern about languages involved, or about certain linguistic features to be taken into consideration is something that cannot be overlooked in the discussion of translation. Illustrations:
If the philosopher Leonard had gone to Japan to deliver his lectures in pragmatics, in order to draw a distinction between the use and the mention of an expression, he might have said something to the following effect:
(15)¡qE Tokyo is a big city, but "Tokyo" is a single word.¡r
But his accompanying translator or interpreter might have to translate (15) into the following (16):
(16)¡qJ Tokyo is a big city, but "Tokyo" is a two-word term.¡r
Of course, "a single word" and " a two-word term" are not in any ordinary sense synonymous. Translations could not be regarded as synonymity-preserving mappings between texts.
Our proposal as explicated in the above (R1a) is to treat successful translations as purpose-preserving transformation of expressions or utterances. We may want to note in passing that the difficulty encountered in the transformation of (15) to (16) can well be avoided. For instance, if Leonard had understood Japanese, he might have tried to avoid the difficulties. He might have used some more or less similar examples and skilfully bypassed the difficulty. For instance, one might say that,
(17)¡qE The capital, Tokyo, is a big city, but "the capital, Tokyo" is a three-word term.¡r
and had it translated as
(18)¡qJ The capital, Tokyo, is a big city, but "the capital, Tokyo" is a three-word term.¡r9
This would be a word-by-word translation of a sort. The potential discrepancy between two languages is buried under the linguistic surface, because of the awareness of the difficulty and the efforts deliberately made to avoid it. This clearly explains to us the centrality of the concern, the topic of concern, and the purpose, in dealing with the problem of translation.
There are of course much more formidable examples than this. Understanding or translating this sentence depends upon the concerns and the topics of concern in uttering the following delivered by a teacher to his students:
(19)Do not use a preposition to end a sentence with!
The very advice, the semiotic act expressed in (19), even though valid, may not be translatable, not to mention easily and readily so, into the Chinese language.
Take another example relayed by Bertrand Russell, the famous 20th century philosopher, and attributed to his grandmother. To outwit the philosophers in the controversy over the nature of, and relation between, mind and body in metaphysics, the old lady, who tutored Russell in mathematics and philosophy among other things, made the following ambiguous and witty observation:
(20)What is mind? No matter; What is matter? Never mind.
This utterance combined in a skiful and tricky manner the following two utterances, one of them being a statement and the other a piece of advice and/or value judgement. That is,
(21)That which is mind is not matter, and that which is matter is not mind, ever. together with
(22)It doesn't matter what mind is, and we should never mind what matter is! In short, (20) is used to perform a mixture of semiotic purposes that cannot be properly mapped onto the Chinese language.
But is this a truly unsolvable case of intranslatability? Again, we have to go back to the question of concerns, topics of concern, and purposes in making the semiotic act depicted in (20).
The author had proposed a hypothetical solution in 1971.10Suppose there is a certain language K in which means "analytic" and means "synthetic", and further means "no matter", and means "never mind", then the following (23) may offer a good case of successful translation to (20) in K.
(23)¡qK What is Z, no Y; what is Y, never Z.¡r
This would make sense earlier in this century when the debate between the analytic and the synthetic, their characterization and relationship, was as problematic and controversial as the debate between mind and body in earlier centuries. 11
Does this show then that nothing is intranslatable across different languages? Certainly not. But, again, the conclusion hinges upon the purpose or purposes expressed in making the original utterance as a way of carrying out some semiotic act. For instance, and a similar example was given in Ho [1971] 12 that the following formula is ambiguous:
(24)(a + b x c)
It may mean
(25)((a + b) x c)
or instead
(26)(a + (b x c))
Suppose we wish to put down (24) with the intention of keeping the ambiguity intact, then it cannot possibly be translated into the Polish-notation-like manner, as only (25)and (26) admit of successful translation in Polish notation as follows:
(25')Mnabc
and
(26')NaMbc
in which "M" and "N" denote the mathematical operators of multiplication and addition respectively, while
(24) remains intranslatable. We cannot, for instance, translate (24)into the following:
(24')AMNabcNaMbc
"A" being the logical operator of disjunction, i.e., the logical "or", because (24'), unlike (24), is totally unambiguous. There is, by the very nature of things, no structural or syntactic ambiguity of this kind existing in the Polish notation.
But why all this concern over ambiguity-preserving translation, or particularly any x-preserving for that manner? Are we not too serious and too deeply indulging in purely academic mental exercise? Does life itself dictate us to do anything of thing of this kind?
Let us make the following observation: It seems to be common knowledge on the one hand, that a great number of formidable or impossible examples of inter-linguistic translations exist. On the other hand, it seems equally obvious and true that a great number of people experience little difficulty in leading a trans-cultural, and hence inter-linguistic, way of life. They can move from one culture to another, from one language to another, without any real sacrifice of the performance of substantial semiotic acts. Life goes on and civilization continues to flourish without us trying to say what is not sayable; therefore, can we not benefit ourselves from the above observation in thinking about translation?
Following this perspective, assuming that Leonard were in Japan, he would carefully choose those utterances that are translatable, in principle at least, to fulfil his purpose, to express his concerns and to indicate his topics of concern. He would not choose expressions that he himself knew were not translatable, if he should be put, and was capable of being put, in the position of translating his own utterances, into Japanese. And he would carefully consider what would be the purposes that he wished to signify in the choice of his utterances. In view of this, we would introduce again the concept of hypothetical intention (first mentioned in [1971]). 13 This is an attempt to revise Leonard's theory of meaning to benefit the discussion of translation. According to Leonard, to ask what an utterance means is to ask what its speaker was intending to accomplish by making that utterance.14 Now let us modify this position and say that to ask what purposes a body of discourse serves to single out is to ask what is author would be intending if he should produce that body of discourse.
Accordingly, our criterion, which was framed in the indicative mood, will be reformulated in the subjunctive mood, thus:
R1b A discourse D' is said to be a successful translation of another discourse D if and only if D' signifies the purposes hypothetically intended by the author of D while D signifies the purposes intended by him.
We let this criterion remain a little vague as we have not spelt out a number of parameters that may otherwise be desirable in the discussion of the mappings that we call translations.

Non-pragmatic Translations: Semantic and Syntactic Conceptions

Translations as explicated above are mappings of semiotic acts through the transformations of discourses. They are pragmatic in nature involving the identification and specification of concerns and topics of concern, and consequently of purposes. However, under certain circumstances, translations can be successfully carried out without much digging into the pragmatics that originate and substantiate the utterance of the original discourses, the production of the source texts. This seems particularly true when dealing with sub-sentential translations.
For instance, a person may try to translate the following into the Chinese language:
(27)Vega in Lyra is the brightest star in the northern sky with an apparently magnitude of 0.14 and an absolute magnitude of +0.5.
He may first explicitly or implicitly come up with some open sentence in the likeness of the following type, either actually being put down on paper or being still tentatively under mental consideration:
(28)¡qcX in Y is the brightest star in the northern sky with an S of 0.14 and a T of +0.5.¡r
when this is in order, then it may be natural for him to assume that the next logical step would be to find¡qc Vega¡r,¡qc Lyra¡r,¡qc apparent magnitude¡rand¡qc absolute magnitude¡rthat can be taken as values of variables X, Y, S and T respectively. This operation is sometimes interpreted, not totally warranted but certainly not without good reasons, as the task of finding synonyms in the Chinese language for "Vega," "Lyra," "apparent magnitude" and "absolute magnitude" individually or collectively. That is, to find four Chinese expressions that would pair off with the above English expressions in a one-to-one manner such that each pair of expressions are synonymous with each other inter-linguistically. The reason that the above two kinds of operation, i.e., assigning a value to a variable in linguistic terms, and finding synonymous pairs of expressions across different languages, are not the same thing, lies in the fact that the former may relate itself to denotative function of language while the latter involves the significative or connotative purposes. 15
To come back to the above example, it is relatively easy to render "apparent magnitude" and "absolute magnitude" into Chinese. We simply look up the terms in scientific handbooks, preferably astronomical ones. There are one-to-one mappings that preserve either denotata or significata coincidence. However, when it comes to the translation of "Vega" and "Lyra," things become much more uncertain, fuzzy, tradition-loaded and culture-bound. As we know, every culture has its long history of observing stars and hence its own way of arranging them. Chinese people have had a long history of their own conception of "constellations" and their own names for important stars, planets, and constellations. For instance, , the Spinning Damsel, is so deeply and widely associated with < cAltair>, the cowherd or rather water-buffalo herd-boy, in the constellation Aquila, in the beautiful, romantic yet sad legend known to practically every Chinese male and female, that it cannot be rendered as the star of string instrument (following ancient Greek tradition) or as the falling eagle (according to the old Arabic legend). Furthermore, in Chinese conception, there is no such constellation in the summer sky, namely the ancient Greek's Chelys, the shell of a tortoise out of which Hermes made the lyre for Orpheus, and after Orpheus' death, Zeus placed it in the sky among other stars. Hence the constellation cannot be rendered in Chinese if we care about Chinese traditional culture.16
Therefore, even when we consider translation in a limited context like that illustrated above, the very ideas of synonymity-preserving mapping is full of pitfalls.
Equally hazardous, if not fatal, is the syntactical conception of translation based upon such ideas as logical replaceability of expressions in a context (i.e., in every context of a certain type). The very idea of machine translation is based, explicitly or implicity, on this concept of replaceability. The whole approach hinges on the belief that logical equivalence between two expressions can be "effectively" determined in a certain (linguistic) context. Whether or not this is a warranted belief, we have to first of all find a way to the effective, though not mechanical, characterization of a context, linguistic or non-linguistic. It is among the central convictions of the author, however, that when we try to specify a context syntactically, we find out, sooner rather than later, that we move from syntactical considerations (concerns and/or topics of concern) to semantical ones, and finally but very quickly end up with deep involvement in pragmatic considerations. The example alluded to above on the transformation between the standard notation and the Polish notation might serve as a ready indication. And, further examples can be thought of ad infinitum.

Concluding Remarks

From the above explication we may reasonably conclude that translation without looking into the intention of the author of the source text is nothing but blind, even though technology and short-term needs may be channelled in such a manner that sometimes blind translations, just like fast food, can well be consumed and digested by many people despite the fact that it is culturally unhealthy and against the principles of linguistic hygienics.
In this regard, it should be emphasized that linguistic hygiene is as important as, if not more important than, cultural health either in the development of a cultural tradition or in the understanding and transplantation of other traditions across different cultures. In fact, these two things are closely and organically related. We are now in an age when careful and thoughtful use of language has been rapidly and on a large scale replaced by careless, ill-cooked and even totally uncultured expressions and ways of utterance. Therefore, going back to the examination of purposes of performing semiotic acts, considering the very utility of speech acts in communication and understanding is all-important and definitely crucial. In line with this consideration, return to act-translations seems to be timely advice. We have already witnessed the destructive effects of bad translations again and again. We cannot possibly represent a notorious personality that respects no laws and fears no God as someone who is lonesome, remote and romantic. What kind of communication can we achieve, and what sort of understanding can we gain, in text-translation of this type?
The rise of symbolic logic, the birth of computational linguistics, together with the enthusiasm about PDP in artificial intelligence studies might convey to us the false hope that semantics may some day be reducible to syntactics, and hence that true machine translations will come into being very soon. However, the central convictions mentioned and explained above seem not at all challenged. Unfortunately, this would be the subject-matter of another paper.

Postscript

A Dedication-in Memory of the Late Professor Henry Siggins Leonard.Sr.
The author wishes to dedicate this article to the late Professor Henry Siggins Leonard, Sr. (1905-1967) with warm memories of personal encounter in the sixties when enrolled in two of his graduate seminars at Michigan State University. Professor Leonard creates afresh a truly admirable example of a devoted teacher and a loving philosopher. His sudden death on a summer day in 1967 while vacationing in Germany deeply grieved his colleagues and students. Having left the States at the end of 1972 and made his home in Hong Kong ever since, the author had not been able to pay his last respects, though he had dreamt of visiting Leonard's grave for many years. It was listed in an old edition of Who Is Who in America that he was born in West Newton, Massachusetts, but buried at Rockville Cemetery in Rockport, Maine. Thinking that it must be Mrs. Leonard's hometown that the late Professor chose for his resting place, the author had always wished to go there to make her acquaintance, saying to her how warmly her husband had always been remembered by a person far far away in a different part of the world. Within the past twenty some years, the most likely occasion happened in 1977-1978 when the author visitedYale University under a senior fellowship program. However, a severe winter that year ( "the blizzard of the century"!) and family responsibilities prevented him from traveling anywhere beyond Boston, still many many miles of snow and ice from Rockport.
Finally in late summer last year the opportunity came. The author took vacation leave from the University and was engaged in a long distance journey with a specific determination to visit Rockport. The author visited New York City, Corning, NY, Buffalo-Nigara Falls, Rochester-Henrietta, Amherst, MA, Glen. NH, and before visiting Boston, Cape Cod, New Haven, Holland, Alma, Owosso and East Lansing, MI, all places of warm memories for over the past thirty years, he drove from Glen in the White Mountains of New Hamshire directly to Rockport, Maine. It was a late August afternoon and the weather in New England had become unpredictable. It rained most of the time, occasionally very heavily. Highway 302 was under repair, which slowed down the speed of travel.
Just before the close of working hours, the author arrived at the township of Rockport with anxiety and unspeakable sadness. The rain had stopped and the sky became clearer and clearer. Driving directly into the Main Street of the town, the author was surprised and disappointed to find that the town was almost abandoned. Stores were closed and there were no people in the street. Rockport is a hilly town facing a clear-water harbor. There were sails and boats on the water, but there was little activity and movement in the harbor. The author found a roadside motel and stopped for assistance. The attendant was new in town and was unaware of the Rockville Cemetery. However, she was most friendly and helpful upon knowing that the author came all the way from Hong Kong to pay tribute to the late Professor. She helped the author with the telephone directory and located two namesakes of the Professor. One of them might be his son, Henry S. Leonard, Jr. The attendent also copied out the telephone number of the Police Department in town, just in case.
Upon calling the Police Department, the author realized that the town went to sleep not at five o'clock, as every one from Hong Kong would expect, bur rather at four in the afternoon. What was more, the police officer in charge was himself new in town. (In fact, there was no Police Department in this small beautiful harbor town of Rockport. The Department belonged to a larger area, a county perhaps.) But again, the officer was most friendly and helpful. He went away to ask somebody else, and after a long while came back with some mixed information. There was no Rockville Cemetery in Rockport! However, there was a large one in the nearby town of Rockville. He kindly and with patience explained to the author the location and the route leading from the telephone booth that the author was using to the cemetery. What to do now? Was the Who is Who incorrect? In retrospect, the author should have written before the trip to confirm the existence and the location of the cemetery. Nevertheless, he embarked again on the uncertain journey with hope of success mixed with preparation for failure.
The sky started to turn dark, although the water in the roadside lakes was still clear. The reflections in the water were crystallized in the very chilly late August air of Maine, a merging of real and dream-like worlds. He drove on, but all was quiet on the highway as if he were the only one on the road, still working on some unfulfilled dream.
There it was! The author made a quick stop. On the right side of the road, under some very big old trees, there was a small open cemetery. He overshot it. And since there was no roadside parking space next to it, he had to back up some distance to a lakeside lot to park the car. He walked fast, almost at a run, to the cemetery, even though he remembered clearly that the police officer mentioned that it was on the left side of the road, and that the cemetery was a large one.
There were little more than one or two dozen tombstones under the tall trees. The stones stood high and appeared aged, seasoned by the passage of time. They were silent and motionless, but proud and dignified, like some eternal and tenseless beings. The inscriptions had been mostly washed away by wind and rain, but they were real and true. Some of them vaguely read dates in the eighteenth century, and some the nineteenth century. A bitter cup of solemnity tea of human history: Leonard was too young to be among them.
Disappointed yet in some very special way fulfilled with an instant understanding of the town, New England, the country and humanity, the author quietly walked back to his car. He gazed at the lake. It was movingly transparent and flawlessly crystallized in its black reflection, even though the sun had long set and everything else had closed its eyes to the light of day. The author started the engine again, thinking that the road would, if nothing else, lead to his next destination.
The sky became less and less colorful and no longer blue and bright. The author picked up speed to move away from the town of Rockport that was now so dear to him. Suddenly, he had a glimpse of tomsbones. And on the left side of the road!
The cemetery was certainly not big in any international sense. But there was a small parking lot in front and a low fence around it with a small gate. Fortunately the gate was not locked.
The author entered and started a fast search as it turned ever late. He looked through the left row, then the middle rows. He had not finished these rows when, abruptly and without apparent reason, he raised his head, turned around and saw a beautifully polished solid red granite monument standing in the rightmost row of the cemetery under the branches of a tree. He ran over and caught full sight of the golden inscription LEONARD. He turned to the other side of the stone with tears in his eyes. Buried under the stone was not only the late Professor, but also his beloved wife Priscilla Leonard. She passed away in 1980.
The author had brought with him mo flowers from town as it had long retired to enjoy a peaceful evening. He could only pick a small flower from the ground and place it on the stone. He bowed deeply three times in the Chinese way. The memories of his respected and beloved teacher and his wife came alive inscripted in the eternity of time and evolution of humanity.
As the first stars came out, the author walked slowly away, taking with him the evening song of a bird in the nearby tree. He could not stay overnight in town to visit the tomb again the next morning, as his schedule dictated that he be in Boston that night. From there he would fly to the Midwest to take a drive to Michigan State University, where he would revisit the good-looking building in which the Professor had had his office and taught the author an unforgettable lesson of being a truly devoted and loving teacher of philosophy.


Notes

1 This was originally a seminar paper submitted to the late Professor Henry S.Leonard in the Fall term of 1966-67 on December 18,1966. The original title was " A Pragmatic Conception of Translation: An Application of Dr. Leonard's Theory of Meaning."
2 There have been other linguistic turns in human history and in the history of philosophy. Most recently analytical philosophy of the early days in this century was also characterized as undergoing a linguistic turn. See the introduction of Rorty [1967].
3 As in author's 1971 paper, we use "L..." to indicate "..." is expressed in language L. And we use "C", "E", "J" to stand for Chinese , English and Japanese respectively.
4 The use of only tow quantifiers and instead of three , and .
5 This translation, or something very similar, appeared again and again in the Western press; it was recently quoted again in the Time Magazine.
6 This observation coincides with the observations made by the contemporary British philosopher John Austin from a different perspective. See Austin [1975].
7 My italics. Leonard further stipulates that expression, indication and signification are therefore three modes of meaning. See Leonard [1975], sections 14.3-14.6.
8 See Ho [1971], p.66. In this 1971 paper, the author tried to spell out the necessary and sufficient conditions for a translation, instead of a successful translation as he is proposing now. According to both criteria, any discourse is trivially a (successful) translation of itself, and by implication, there may be more than one (successful) translation of a particular discourse.
9 "The capital Tokyo" can naturally be translated as "ªF¨Ê³£" which is the conventional name of the city. It consists of three words (three characters, or three kan ji).
10 See ibid. pp.76-77
11 See Quine [1951]
12 Ho [1971]
13 Ibid., p.73
14 See, for instance, Leonard [1951a].
15 we cannot go into detail here concerning the relationship between these two aspects of language. See Leonard [1957], Part III, units 20-24, or Ho [1984], ch.3, secton13.
16 Of course, the whole sentence can now be scientifically translated; in fact this could be done after 1928 when the current designation of 88 constellations was adopted by the international astronomical community. A Chinese astronomer could now call the constellation , and translate "Vega" simply as , without any reference to his own cultural heritage.

Bibliography

Austin, John L.1975. How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Ho, Hsiu-hwang. 1971. "A Pragmatic Concept of Translation," Philosophical Review, no.1, National Taiwan University, Taiwan.
Ho, Hsiu-hwang. 1984. Logic (I): Introduction to the Nature and the Methods of Logic (In Chinese), Tung-hwa Book Co., Taipei.
Leonard, Henry S.1957. Principles of Right Reason, Henry Holt and Co., New York.
Leonard, Henry S.1959a. "Authorship and Purpose," Philosophy of Science, vol. 26, no.4, pp.277-94.
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Quine, Willard V. 1951. "Two Dogmans of Empiricism,"Philosophical Reviesw, LX pp.20-20-43 Roroty, Richard,. 1967. The Linguistic Turn, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.