Translation from Chinese to English (Nestorian Stele)

[prephil]

I'm trying to translate the character in the centre of the image (to the right of guo2) into English using Pleco but it doesn't recognise it. It's an image of the Nestorian Stele. From Wikipedia it says it is 流 (liu2) but the the one in the picture looks different to me. Can anyone explain this to me?

[skylee]

This one is about the spread of the belief of the Roman Catholic church in China, right? It is a variant of 流, nothing wrong with it. Take a look at the Variant Dictionary -> http://140.111.1.40/...ra/fra02188.htm

And thanks for asking the question. I had never noticed that the standard form of 流 in Taiwan (9 strokes, and it is not a dot at the top on the right) is so different from the standard form in Hong Kong (10 strokes, with a dot at the top on the right).

[OneEye]

Whoa, neither had I. I'm kind of surprised my teachers aren't marking off for it, but maybe a dot is acceptable even if it doesn't conform to the standard.

[xiaocai]

And you may notice that the 景 the 國 and the 碑 look different from what you usually see as well. I think variants were quite common then as there was no such a thing as "national standard".

[sleepy eyes]

Are you trying to produce a general translation?

If you are, you probably know all of this, but it doesn't hurt to mention (this is just me thinking outloud, sorry):

If you want to have a firm grasp on the meaning of that document, I hardly think you could do so without a highly specialized lexicon, if there is one, or a monograph upon the stele. From what I can gather it's very contaminated by the Syriac of the Nestorians, much in the same way as Sanskrit can play upon the chinese of several buddhist documents. Plus it was written in 781. Is Pleco's Classical Chinese Dictionary dict. available yet? Would it be enough to gloss this text?

Not to mention that, at least for Ancient Greece, epigraphic material is notoriously harder to understand than others, mainly because it's written in the local dialects, if outside of Athens - making it very hard to grasp for lack of a good foundational corpus on those - or in a more demotic Athenian, both of which deviate quite a bit from the more literary standards we can actually understand and gloss properly. I wouldn't be surprised if all of these points applied to China as well, given the existence of dialects, a written literary standard etc., even though the Stele is a more formal document. I'm still far from plunging into sinitic philology, but experience tells me this kind of material is always quite problematic, regardless of the language.

Anyways, it's a very interesting document, anything related to Ricci is interesting enough for me.

[prephil]

Not looking for a general translation. Just trying to figure out why, when I typed the character into Pleco, it wouldn't recognise it.

I was mistaking the radical in the centre character on the steele for the character on the left in the Pleco image below. It's actually the one on the right in the image. Doh. Thanks for the replies.