Xing Lu says one of the problems with the existing research on Chinese rhetoric is a dependency on translations. The texts we have read so far were not originally composed in English; they were written in Greek or Latin or Chinese. However, the issue of translation has not yet arisen. What makes the study of Chinese rhetoric more problematic when reading from a translation?

English is a Germanic language, but its vocabulary has borrowed heavily from Latin, French (a language derived from Latin), and Greek. Finding an English word to use in place of the Greek word is less difficult because the English word is probably a cognate with the Greek word. Difficulties still arise because words have different connotations and several centuries elapsed since the original words were spoken, but Chinese does not have many English cognates.

Many of the Greek terms came into being because of the specific Greek culture. When English borrows the words, the may develop new meanings. “Sophist” was originally a Greek school of thought; the words “sophism” and “sophistication” have very different meanings from the original word. In English, there is no tradition related to the phrase 名家 (mingjia). The original author probably considered Liu Hseih’s third criterion of “the creation of linguistic patterns forceful enough to raise the important points into relief.” Translation will usually obscure this effort in the original text. The missing common linguistic root adds an additional hurdle to translation, making the reader need to be even more aware of the Chinese text as a translated text than when he is reading Plato or Cicero.