Essays

English needs its own shit mountain too. As long as it’s messy enough, you can cram in whatever unsuitable new words and assign them meanings at random with no sense of incongruity at all. Chinese cares too much about conveying meaning; translation has to be faithful, expressive, and elegant, and for many loanwords, once you really think about it, there’s simply no suitable expression. Take token, the word everyone’s been discussing lately—whether you translate it as 代币, 令牌, or 词元, none of them is universal; forced translation only leaves you failing to convey the meaning in different contexts. For example, “need a 词元 to verify account ownership” “use a 令牌 to pay for this transaction” “the LLM splits the sentence into individual 代币” This is just bizarre. You can’t find a single translation that broadly and uniformly covers it; in the end it’ll just become the next cookie, so you might as well not translate it at all.