Category Archives: Literature 文学

2023: ChatGPT3.5 Classical Chinese Translation Corrected

Posted on 09/30/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Exploring the capabilities of ChatGPT3.5 for Chinese translation has been fun. As always with machine translations the quality of the output depends on the complexity of the text: narrative usually comes out much better than moral arguments. As I was … Continue reading →

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1788 More Qing Ghosts: 子不語 Zibuyu Chapter II

Posted on 08/06/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Reading old Chinese ghost stories and strange tales is great fun. I recently translated the first chapter from the early Great Qing (aka Qing Dynasty) collection 《子不語》 What Confucius Would Not Discuss by Yuan Mei (Chinese: 袁枚; pinyin: Yuán Méi; … Continue reading →

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2023: Hit Pop Song “Luosha and the Sea Market” Amuses China, Worries Censors

Posted on 08/03/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Heavy censorship is one of the forces driving obscurity in literature. The current Chinese pop song 《罗刹海市》 luō shā hǎi shì which might be translated as “Luosha and the Sea Market” since it apparently refers one at least on one … Continue reading →

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1788: Chinese Ghost Stories from “What Confucius Would Not Discuss”

Posted on 07/26/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

A ghost story collection was the top of a recent Twitter note by the Hungarian student of China Jakabfi Károly (霸王最忠之臣子) Károly has the parenthetical Twitter Chinese moniker ‘the most loyal minister of the hegemon’ – keep in mind hegemons … Continue reading →

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2023: Digital Articles Disappearing? Learn from the Emperors — Write in Stone

Posted on 06/04/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

With all the digital documents and databases that we use these days, I wonder about how easy it is to alter or erase old documents. Sometimes on Chinese databases you might run (or don’t run into, but did before!) into … Continue reading →

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300 BCE: Mencius on his Contemporary Chen Liang

Posted on 06/03/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Translated from the article Chen Liang (Great Confucian of the State of Chu) ( 陈良（荆楚大儒） on the Brief Biographies of Famous People 名人簡歷 website. Two brothers, followers of Chen Liang, who went from Chu to the lands of the Duke … Continue reading →

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2023: Baidu on Xu Xing, a Contemporary of Mencius

Posted on 05/30/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Reading the Mencius lately, I came across this reference to another thinker contemporary to Mencius, looked him up on the Baidu online encyclopedia and then made this translation using ChatGPT as a translation tool. The China of 2500 years ago … Continue reading →

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2023: Chinese Food Security Concerns Past and Present

Posted on 05/24/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

There is an old Chinese saying: Food means everything to the people. 民以食爲天 mín yǐ shí wèi tiān I recently read a passage in the Mencius/孟子 about taxation (Mencius Book III Part A, section 3) that hints that benevolent rulers … Continue reading →

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2023: ChatGPT3.5 Does the Diamond Sutra

Posted on 05/19/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

Lately I have been finding ChatGPT doing a creditable job translating ancient Chinese texts including material from Mengzi/Mencius , Sun Zi‘s The Art of War and the first chapter of an ancient Chinese text on spying and intelligence — the … Continue reading →

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2023: Banning ‘Bad Artists’ China’s Harsh Standards

Posted on 03/23/2023 by 高大伟 David Cowhig

My translation of a recent protest from Li Xuezheng producer of the famed PRC TV series “In the Name of the People”人民的名义 against arbitrariness and censorship in the PRC movie industry. Another example of the harsh arbitrary ‘standards’ applied to … Continue reading →

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