Talk:Xiehouyu

Translations vs glosses
江山易改，本性難易. I read this as rivers and mountains may change their shape, but not their nature, not as The fox may grow gray but never good, as the current revision indicates. 物以類聚，人以群分 similarly does not gloss literally as Birds of a feather flock together. At what point are we translating the original Chinese and at what point are we providing our own interpretation based on English idioms? My feeling is that either formulation is acceptable, but we should provide to readers unfamiliar with Chinese some distinction between when we translate literally and when we provide a comparable English idiom. <3 Folly Mox (talk) 02:37, 10 May 2021 (UTC)