Talk:Northern Treasury Under Heaven

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Before I start, here's a reminder that the official English publication of Dynasty is riddled with so many erroneous translations that their translations for place names have lost their authoritativeness. Take for example, their epic fail of mistranslating "Mohist village" to "Ink Village". Hence, our practice is to use our own translations for place names from Dynasty.

We have already had an extensive and fruitful discussion today on Discord regarding how we would like to translate 天下北庫 (Tiānxià Běi Kù), and I am summarizing it here so that it goes on record and can be continued formally.

天下 (Tiānxià) = "[all] under Heaven"; world
北 (běi) = north
庫 (kù) = storehouse; repository; treasury; vault

The translation in the official English publication is "Northern Treasury of the World".

Treasury

One of the main questions I raised is whether treasuryis actually an accurate translation in this case. In English, a treasury is a place where treasure or money is stored, but the vault we see here seems to contain more weapons and armor than gold and jewellery. If not for the fact Pei Min does happen to mention that it contains "cash and fabrics" (錢帛), i.e. money and valuable goods, I would not think treasury is a correct translation in this context at all. For a vault of this function, armory sounds much more appropriate.

Note that while 庫 (kù) by itself is ambiguous, it is clarified by the fuller term 府庫 (fǔkù) Pei Min uses to refer to these vaults. That is, interpretation of it should involve referring to the preceding full term about the category that this place belongs to, where 庫 (kù) can be taken as short for 府庫 (fǔkù). The few sources online translate this into "government treasury" or "government repository". The tension here is that while the Chinese encyclopedia Baike describes 府庫 (fǔkù) as including documents and weapons, the English word treasury practically excludes military gear. A treasury is for funds, finances, and treasure; being an emergency cache of military equipment is not its function. I personally would translate 府庫 more as an "government or administrative vault" since vault is more inclusive than treasury. Indeed, even just describing this place, I find it natural to call it a vault in English.

My opinion was that translating this as a "treasury" is not necessarily wrong, but it's kind of a reach. But Soranin countered that "treasury passes along the reverence they seem to have to the special items in their storage, like the dagger, the spear and the h[eavily] k[ing] armor that is missing when thinking of it just as an armory," and I think this is actually an excellent argument that is making me reconsider my position.

I also originally favoured calling this an "armoury", but if it does include money and valuable goods, then the word armoury also sounds too exclusionary.

Cristophorus has a more daring proposal to use "Sanctuary" as the translation instead.

We've rejected warehouse and storehouse as too mild in this context and strong room because that emphasizes the vault being securely sealed instead of just hidden.

World vs. Tianxia

There are some arguments for leaving tianxia as an untranslated word or translating it literally as "under Heaven" instead of "world".

Coming from a background in international relations and foreign policy, with a specialty in Indo-Pacific politics, I am aware that Tianxia has been used as a Sinocentric political concept, as its Wikipedia article describes. Orientalist Western analyses tend to characterize China's political worldview as static for 4000 years, with China being the civilized centre of the world surrounded by peripheral rings of progressively less civilized barbarians, but I argue that this should be better understood as the pre-Han geographical understanding, when Chinese civilization had not yet encountered other urbanized societies. Some Chinese scholars have even tried to pioneer a revival of Tianxia as an alternative model of international order, one that serves to justify Chinese world hegemony. I would argue that these interpretations of the term tianxia are modern projections that are not entirely historical.

Thus, I would like to caution everyone from attaching too many political connotations to the term 天下 (tiānxià) but instead to treat it as a neutral and principally geographical term. Only recently did I learn that it was a common word for world in the Chinese language prior to Buddhism's arrival, when 世界 (shìjiè), a term translated from Sanskrit, replaced 天下 (tiānxià) as the everyday word for world. I think there is a risk of always assuming that certain foreign words mean more than they really mean. For instance, my Mongolian best friend tells me that Westerners always think of khan as referring to a special type of ruler particular to nomadic tribes, but in the Mongolian language, khan just means "king" and is used for all kings, even European ones. Another example I gave off the top of my head is the Chinese word for train, 火車 (huǒchē), which literally means "fire car". In translating 火車 (huǒchē), it would be incorrect to say "fire car" instead of just "train". Sometimes we can be so fixated on translating a term so literally, we fail to realize that for everyday people using that word, its meaning was really much simpler.

It's possible then that 天下 (tiānxià) should be translated as simply "world" more often. In Dragon Ball (Z), 天下一武道会 (Tenka'ichi Budōkai) is also translated as the World Martial Arts Tournament.

Lacrossedeamon still maintains that we should either leave 天下 (tiānxià) untranslated here or translate it as ". . .under Heaven". Against my above arguments, I have come around to this view because I think it is possible that the intent behind 天下 (tiānxià) in the name of these vaults is poetic. Also, calling this a "world treasury" does not immediately make sense to me since these vaults are specific to the Chinese Assassins. 天下 (tiānxià) therefore may implicitly take on a more limited sense of the "Chinese world". A simple translation as "world" could even be a stronger (and less safe) claim about its meaning.

Cristophorus agrees with Lacrosse that ". . .under Heaven" sounds strongest in English, so our consensus to translate as such has been reached.

North vs. Northern

Soranin, Lacrosse, and Cris all think that "northern" sounds much better than "north" despite my initial thought that "north" is more concise than "northern" when it comes to a place name.

Pending translation

"Northern. . .under Heaven"

If any other editors, especially those with a Chinese-language background, would like to weigh in on this, feel free to do so! Since this is a major location in the plot of Dynasty, it is important to get its name right.

Sol Pacificus^(Cyfiero) 22:54, 23 March 2023 (UTC)