This is a popup for the Chinese version of On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur 'It is only with the heart that one sees rightly', from The Little Prince.

'Le coeur / the heart'

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One of the most interesting features of the Chinese translations is the split over le coeur 'heart'. Some translators use 心 xīn 'the heart'; others use 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng, meaning 'the spirit'. The split is roughly 3:2. The following table shows how le coeur 'the heart' is translated in all 48 translations.

(Note: One translator uses 自己的心灵 zìjǐ de xīnlíng 'one's own spirit', which takes the emphasis off seeing with the heart as opposed to the eyes, and places it on self-reliance in perception.)

心 xīn 'the heart' and 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng are defined as follows in Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries:

There's not a lot to choose between them. If anything, 心灵 xīnlíng tends towards the meaning 'soul'. (Just as an aside, the 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' books are translated into Chinese using 心灵 xīnlíng.) But this is hardly a decisive reason for using it in preference to 心 xīn. So what might have induced some translators to choose 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng over 心 xīn? After all, 心 xīn is much simpler! Some possibilities:

• 心 xīn has a broad spectrum of meanings ranging from 'heart', to 'centre', 'key point', etc. By contrast, 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng is focussed narrowly on the relevant sense of coeur.
• The phrase 用心 yòng xīn 'with heart' has two quite specific dictionary meanings that could be misleading:
  1. 用心 yòng xīn means 'diligently, attentively, with concentration'. The fox's secret could conceivably mean 'Only by looking attentively can one see clearly'.
  2. 用心 yòngxīn means 'motive, purpose, intention' (grammatically one word -- a noun -- but Chinese script doesn't indicate words). It's just possible to interpret this as meaning 'Only with an intention can one see clearly'.

While these are not serious problems -- the intended meaning is fairly clear from the context -- the unambiguous 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng could be considered superior to the vaguer word 心 xīn.

Indeed, these problems may be the reason that one adaptation renders 'heart' as 『心』 "xin", setting the word off with quotation marks.

Whatever the cause, a goodly portion of Chinese translators feel that 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng is the right word to translate coeur / heart, a phenomenon that isn't found in either the Japanese or Vietnamese translations.

French vs English

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There's one other puzzle about 心 xīn vs 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng: there's a significant difference between translators working from Saint Exupéry's French original and those working from Katherine Woods' English translation. Translations from the French are considerably more likely to use 心 xīn. See the table below:

Roughly three-quarters of translators working from the French use 心 xīn, compared with only about half from English. This is a truly puzzling phenomenon and I would be loath to hazard any firm guesses for the cause. One possibility that suggests itself is dictionaries. If French-Chinese dictionaries gave 心 xīn as the first equivalent for coeur and English-Chinese dictionaries gave 心靈 / 心灵 xīnlíng, then this would be a prima facie case for asserting translator reliance on dictionaries as a cause. But since I don't have a broad range of French-Chinese and English-Chinese dictionaries, I'll leave this as an exercise for someone else to pursue.

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