Many paths to 'enlightenment'

Perhaps it was more exhaustion than exasperation - after editing two enormous articles and five or six book reviews over the past week - but I just threw in the towel on my latest editing assignment, after merely skimming the first few pages.

The trouble, you see, was that I tend to rely very heavily on the title and abstract (and library categories, if suggested) to try to work out what the heck one of these articles is about.  They're usually written first - or at least conceived - in Chinese, and then indifferently rendered into English, either by the author or by a miserably underpaid Chinese translator (you can't complain too much about the wretched quality of their work when you realise that they're probably earning less per hour than a domestic cleaner - a cleaner working for a foreign employer, at any rate).  I don't have access to those original versions; and it wouldn't do me much good if I did.  No, I have to read the 'Chinglish' - and try to guess what it is supposed to be about.

And this latest one defeated me because it purports to be about 'Enlightenment Ideas' (yes, with initial capitals; but this is in the title, so this may not be significant).  Unfortunately, later on in the abstract, it mostly talks about 'enlightenment' without an initial capital.  Though, at the end, it does seem to be placing this in the context of something it calls the 'Enlightenment Movement' or the 'Modernization Movement' (or the 'Modernization Enlightenment Movement' or the 'Enlightenment Modernization Movement'; these are probably all supposed to be the same thing - Chinese writers don't pay a lot of attention to word order).  Yes, those are all spelled with initial capitals (but without the single inverted commas, which are my way of indicating that I'm quoting exactly from my author).

From my brisk overview of the abstract and the first couple of pages, I think the piece is probably attempting to draw parallels from the Enlightenment (which didn't as such happen in China; you know, more of a European thing - but let's not get into that right now...), but is mostly concerned with the intellectual climate in China at the end of the 1800s and in the early 1900s.  To my knowledge, none of the intellectual movements of this time in China have been labelled a Chinese 'Enlightenment' (which probably would have an initial capital, if only to show that it was named after the European intellectual revolution of a century-and-a-half earlier; and would almost certainly require single inverted commas, to show that the appellation is derived from elsewhere, and not universally recognised or accepted).  I suspect the author/translator is speaking of what is commonly known as the New Culture Movement (but this is a very well-known set phrase in English, and a fairly literal translation of the universally used Chinese term - so I can't imagine why my writer didn't use this), which might be seen as a kind of 'Enlightenment', akin to it in some ways.  But we really need that initial capital (and the single inverted commas), if that's what he means.

Ah, and there's one further layer of potential confusion in all of this.  The author is focusing on Buddhist writers, so.... at least occasionally, he's talking about that kind of 'enlightenment' as well.  Oh dear.

I wouldn't even try to get into a topic like that if I were writing (oops - I suppose I'm doing it now, in a very modest way!).  Not as a non-native speaker, anyway.  There's such a world of difference between Voltaire et al asserting the primacy of reason and Asian ascetics getting all trippy after pronouncing om in a cave non-stop for 10 years (and between either of these and Cai Yuanpei et al trying to drag China into the 20th century), that I would step gingerly around the linguistic minefield of trying to distinguish those different varieties of 'enlightenment'.  While I am alive to the possibly intriguing similarities between these different milieus and outlooks - and I do relish the wordplay of it all, I do! - I think it's just too damned hard to say anything very useful or comprehensible about all this (not that these have ever been the sort of criteria to deter a Chinese 'academic' from seeking publication!).

And I think that would be true even if the source material I'd been given to work with were already in very good English; whereas, in fact, it is of course written in the most lamentably inept Chinglish - which simply uses the word enlightenment (or various not-exact-cognates!!) throughout, to refer to any or all of these different concepts (and possibly some others as well that haven't yet occurred to me) without any distinction.

If I were prepared to put in the hours of blood, toil, tears and sweat (as I usually do), I probably could eventually piece together what on earth this chap is trying to say.  But I don't see why I should bother.  It's about time the Chinese (or their most "distinguished" academics and translators, anyway) started to pay attention to the importance of initial capitals.... and the appropriate use of single or double inverted commas.... and consistent nomenclature.... etc.

This is my foot: down it has been put.  (As Finn might have put it.)