More than likely he had students assist him with his translations, and certainly editors, but, yes, it is possible. In the Japanese company where I worked, my native Japanese speaking and reading colleagues (with university-level kanji fluency) who had only the faintest with Chinese language as studied in a language class, but who had studied Chinese literature, were often able to read and understand written Modern Standard Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) to quite a satisfying degree. (The only one who had studied Mandarin -- for one year some ten years prior -- had a much higher level of understanding than a present-day native-English-speaking colleague who has apparently studied it for six years, or so it seems to be in retrospect.) However, when trying to produce actual written MSC sentences, they were at a loss due to inability to grasp the syntax. (One should note that their English was unsurprisingly better and that our primary language of communication was Japanese
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Reading, writing and speaking are extremely different things. I'm native Chinese too, and I've studied it all my life, but I'm embarrassed to admit that my speaking pales in comparison to my reading. My writing's somewhere in between.
If I'm not wrong, listening and speaking are some of the hardest parts of picking up a foreign language, mostly cause it involves such active participation. With reading and writing, time can be taken to look up dictionaries and do research on accurate translations, etc.
Not Chinese, but seconding anyway. My speech is terrible on the basis that it tends to be tonally ambiguous, however I've had several Chinese friends admit that I know how to read and write far more than they do, in spite of my limited Chinese vocabulary (Studied Japanese for several years before taking up Chinese, so I've got a solid foundation in hanzi and built off of that). It's actually rather interesting seeing how many people with Chinese experience can either only speak (mostly ABC, from what I've seen) vs. how many can only read Chinese.
Seconding this as well. Research in translation theory has stated that "bilingual" and "translator" are not necessarily inclusive of one another. All that is needed of a good translator is high reading comprehension, not speaking, writing, or listening. If this professor works deep in the literary field, I wouldn't be surprised if he hasn't had the time to develop other facets of his Chinese yet.
Thirding. As a white Translation Studies student in a mostly non-white cohort I could go on forever about the expectations thrust upon the white bilingual. In terms of my Chinese, I have pretty advanced reading skills, but my speaking/listening ain't that hot. But then I comfort myself by saying, well, I've only ever been in China a whole month in my entire (young) life! Whenever you tell a monolingual that you speak an Asian language there seems a whole set of preconcieved notions about your "fluency" - either you're an amazing bilingual Superman capable of almost any linguistic undertaking, or a complete wannabe novice or can barely say 你好.
That all being said, the further you delve into translation and translation theory, the more you realise how complex it all is. Competency in either language is really only a starting point: the skill of "translation" is completely seperate to that and will only get better after decades of practice.
I don't know. I'm not sure that it would be an extremely accurate translation unless the translator had actually studied and experienced translating Chinese to Japanese.
Although, I think it's definitely possible to read a language and mostly understand while not being able to speak it or write it.
Similar situations: translating Dutch to German or Portuguese to Spanish, although it's probably easier to translate in those cases than it is with Chinese-Japanese. I'm not really familiar with any of those languages, but just throwing that out there. :P
He was probably being honest when he said that he couldn't speak Chinese at all. Japanese high schoolers learn an awkward form of Classical Chinese used for writing Japanese, but barely anyone actually figures out anything more than the basics (which they immediately forget), and the vocabulary is probably much more similar to old Japanese than modern Chinese
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Nothing to do with Japan, just saying--this is what bothers me about a lot of academics. If you're going to spend your entire life studying a country and its literature or culture, and then pretend to be an "expert" on it, YOU DAMN WELL BETTER LEARN THE LANGUAGE, OR YOU LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT.
He might be able to produce a semblance of a translation just by looking at the Chinese characters, but I certainly wouldn't waste my time reading it, much less pay money for it. He probably had one of his grad students do it for him and then he took credit for it.
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If I'm not wrong, listening and speaking are some of the hardest parts of picking up a foreign language, mostly cause it involves such active participation. With reading and writing, time can be taken to look up dictionaries and do research on accurate translations, etc.
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That all being said, the further you delve into translation and translation theory, the more you realise how complex it all is. Competency in either language is really only a starting point: the skill of "translation" is completely seperate to that and will only get better after decades of practice.
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Similar situations: translating Dutch to German or Portuguese to Spanish, although it's probably easier to translate in those cases than it is with Chinese-Japanese. I'm not really familiar with any of those languages, but just throwing that out there. :P
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He might be able to produce a semblance of a translation just by looking at the Chinese characters, but I certainly wouldn't waste my time reading it, much less pay money for it. He probably had one of his grad students do it for him and then he took credit for it.
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