Reading the introduction and chapter one of Xing Lu’s Rhetoric in Ancient China, the question that kept running through my mind was, “Is it any wonder that historically international diplomacy and negotiation often fail and lead to war?”

Lu explains the difficulty is truly coming to understand ideas in another culture. First, there is the translation of a given text—was the translator faithful to the original idea, or can one even be truly faithful? If it’s not possible be truly faithful or literal because “the interlingual translation is bound to reflect the translator’s own creative interpretation of the source language (Bassnett-McGuire in Lu, 11), or if fidelity isn’t “serviceable,” as Benjamin argues (10) because the context must be considered to make the text accessible to readers of a new generation or culture, has the translator gained enough cultural understanding of the context to interpret or “appropriate” the text? What if it isn’t a culturally-informed translation, but rather has imperialistic or ethnocentric goals? How does a reader know this if he or she is depending on the translation? If a translator must “[reexperience] the mental processes of the text’s author” (Palmer in Lu, 19), how many of us are in a position to do this or even to evaluate whether it has been done by someone else?

In the case of Western scholars trying to understand Chinese rhetoric, in spite of similarities between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions, such as ancient Chinese philosophers condemning “false or flowery speeches” and sounding very much like Aristotle’s arguing against too much poetry in speech or similar traditions of “vigorous debates and persuasive speeches” (30), the differences have been noted much more than the similarities on both sides of the world. The West has been guilty of Orientalism, the East of Occidentalism, assuming great differences between ourselves and the “other,” and creating polarization rather than authentic attempts to understand each other (14).

If centuries of scholars who dedicated their lives to rhetorical study were unable to understand each other’s use of language, I can’t help but wonder how a composition teacher can succeed in bridging the language gaps in a classroom with English learners. Lu sees the translator as mediator between the writer and the reader. In a classroom of students not familiar with U.S. culture or Western rhetoric, how can we as composition teachers be translator-mediators, and how can we also teach students to be their own mediators as well? Can we become aware enough of our own “ideational lenses” (20) so that they don’t get in the way of us understanding our students and their writing or helping them to develop their writing and their confidence in a new culture? Lu states, “[The] hermeneutical experience is one of identity transformation for the interpreter” through “interactions with others and with the world at large” (24). Maybe if we’re willing to be transformed by the process, Lu’s ideas for translating cultures and texts fits into the composition classroom.