Here's what I understand:

- You've got a pet peeve.

- You're going to rant about it, because you want to, whether or not it's relevant to an existing conversation.

- You didn't bother to think about my comments.

- You didn't bother to think about habinero's comment either.

Here is the same passage of the Analects (part of the chapter Gongye Chang) in different translations:

--- Annping Chin ---

Zilu said, "We would like to hear what you would like to see yourself accomplish."

The Master said, "To give comfort to the old, to have the trust of my friends, and to have the young seeking to be near me."

--- David Hinton ---

Adept Lu then said: "No Master, we'd like to hear your greatest ambition."

"To comfort the old, to trust my friends, and to cherish the young."

---

Our focus here is on the second line, what Confucius says. Does he want to trust his friends, or does he want his friends to trust him?

Does he want to cherish the young, or does he want them to cherish him?

We might also ask, though the translators have agreed on this point, whether he wants to comfort the elderly or for the elderly to comfort him. (And we could further ask whether Confucius wants to personally comfort the elderly, or whether what he has in mind is for society in general to do that.)

All three clauses are formed the same way in the original Classical Chinese, and for a couple of interacting technical reasons they are all ambiguous in this way. Translators, as you can see, make different choices.

But of relevance here, when you're doing a translation to English, you have no option but to make a choice. It isn't possible to render the original text 'in literal translation' and append a note explaining what went wrong. You must commit to a meaning behind the text and phrase that meaning in English. You can also append a note explaining that you might have chosen wrong, but English simply doesn't allow you to do anything that parallels the source material.

Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)