L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux, Comparing Chinese versions

How do Chinese translators tackle L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux ('What is essential is invisible to the eye'), from 'The Little Prince'?

Here I look at 48 translations of Le Petit Prince into Chinese -- excluding adaptations and the plagiarised version of Liǔ 2004. Of these, 24 appear to be translated from the French, 23 from the English of Catherine Woods, and one is unclear.

We'll break variation into two types: Grammatical structure and expressive content, with a section on an exceptional pattern. In this sentence variation is dominated by grammatical considerations -- in particular the use of the enigmatic 是 ... 的 shì ... de construction.

1. GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE

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The problem of invisible

The key word in this sentence is invisible ('invisible'), an adjective meaning 'which cannot be seen'. This is the pivot on which the sentence hinges.

In its most basic form, the sentence can be understood as meaning Les yeux ne voient pas l'essentiel 'The eyes do not see what is essential'. By using invisible, Saint Exupéry catapaults l'essentiel into subject position, like this:

les yeux	ne voient pas	l'essentiel

l'essentiel	est invisible	(pour les yeux)

In other words, invisible acts like passive voice, and l'invisible becomes the topic of the sentence.

The problem is that Chinese lacks an adjective equivalent to invisible. True, there are a couple of words that appear to provide a good fit, but they are not really suitable.

不可视 bùkěshì means 'unobservable' or 'invisible' but is a specialised term confined to scientific or academic contexts.
無形 / 无形 wúxíng 'formless' is mainly used for palpable things that can't be seen because they lack a perceivable shape.

To express the actual meaning of the sentence in Chinese, we must go back to basics and say 'The eyes cannot see what is essential'.

The obvious choice here is 看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'unable to see'. This is the negative potential form of the resultative verb 看见 kàn-jiàn 'to see'. So logically speaking, our sentence would look like this:

BASIC SENTENCE, WITH 'EYES' AS SUBJECT
Subject	Verb	Object
眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eye'	看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'cannot see'	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'

Note: 本质 běnzhì is Mainland Chinese standard. Taiwan standard is 本質, pronounced běnzhí.

"The eyes cannot see essential things"

But there is NOT A SINGLE TRANSLATOR who uses a sentence like this.

There are three main ways in which translations vary from this hypothetical norm. Unfortunately for our analysis, these variations occur both singly and in combination.

a. 'Eyes' as an instrument

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More than half of the 47 translators don't treat 'eyes' as the subject, they treat them as an instrument. That is, the basic sentence looks more like this:

BASIC SENTENCE, WITH 'EYES' AS INSTRUMENT
Subject	Prep. phrase	Verb	Object
(人 rén 'person')	用眼睛 yòng yǎnjing 'use the eye'	看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'cannot see'	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'

"A person cannot see essential things with the eyes"

The instrumental interpretation may find favour with translators because it allows parallelism with the previous sentence (On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur), which uses the instrumental 'using the heart'.

In Chinese, the clause 用眼睛 yòng yǎnjing 'use the eye' comes before 'cannot see' instead of after it. Moreover, 用 yòng itself is usually regarded as a verb, so that the sentence becomes a double-verb sentence.

Although the subject of the sentence is theoretically something like 人 rén 'people', in fact no translation actually has an explicit subject.

Only one translator uses this simple sentence pattern, although with somewhat more elaborate vocabulary:

TRANSLATION BASED ON THE BASIC SENTENCE
Subject	Prep. phrase	Verb	Object
Omitted	單是透過雙眼 dān shì tòuguò shuāngyǎn 'just through the two eyes'	看不見 kàn-bu-jiàn 'cannot see'	事情的真像 shìqíng de zhēnxiàng 'true image of things'

b. The 是 ... 的 shì ... de construction

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With one exception (see below), all other translators use a structure that I'll call the 'shi ... de construction'. In this construction, the words 是 shì and ... 的 de act as a 'frame' around a particular part of the sentence, with 的 de concluding the sentence.

The shi ... de construction may be one of the most poorly explained phenomena in Chinese grammar. Its broad range of uses, one shading into another, defies simple categorisation. We won't try and describe them here. What we can say is that:

是 shì stresses or emphasises what follows it;
的 de concludes the sentence with a sense of affirmation, explanation, or assertion.

Here, 是 ... 的 shì ... de is used in a contrastive and emphatic sense. Applying it in a straightforward way to our two basic sentences, we get this:

ADDING 是 ... 的 shì ... de
	Subject		shi	Verb + Object	de
	眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eye'		是 shì	看不见本质的东西 kàn-bu-jiàn běnzhì de dōngxi 'cannot see essential things'	的 de
	Subject	'With the eyes'	shi	Verb + Object	de
(instrumental)	Omitted	用眼睛 yòng yǎnjing 'with the eye'	是 shì	看不见本质的东西 kàn-bu-jiàn běnzhì de dōngxi 'cannot see essential things'	的 de

Here shi ... de places contrastive emphasis on 'cannot see essential things'. The contrast is with the previous sentence:

CONTRASTIVE COMPARISON OF CONTENT IN THE TWO SENTENCES
Sentence	Means	Result	Yes/No
1.	with the heart	can see (essential things)	YES
2.	with the eyes	can see essential things	NO

The key point emphasised is that, in contrast with the heart ,which CAN SEE CLEARLY, the eyes CANNOT SEE ESSENTIAL THINGS.

Nine translators (one-fifth of the total) use this particular sentence pattern.

But while the pattern is perfectly adequate for expressing the meaning, it suffers from one drawback: it doesn't match the order of the original English and French. To achieve this, 'essential things' must be brought to the head of the sentence. To do this, it's necessary to make it the topic of the sentence.

c. Topicalisation

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In the French original, the sentence opens with l'essentiel as the theme, and then makes a statement about that theme.

ORDER OF ELEMENTS IN FRENCH AND ENGLISH
	Subject	Copula	Adjective plus Prep Phrase
French	L'essentiel	est	invisible pour les yeux
English	What is essential	is	invisible to the eye

All in all, 34 translators (three-quarters of the total) make l'essentiel into the topic of the sentence.

This is how our sentence above looks after l'essentiel has been catapulted to the start of the sentence to serve as its topic:

TOPICALISATION
	TOPIC	Subject		shi	Verb	de
	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'	眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eye'		是 shì	看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'cannot see'	的 de
	TOPIC	Subject	Prep. phrase	shi	Verb	de
(with instrumental)	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'	Omitted	用眼睛 yòng yǎnjing 'with the eye'	是 shì	看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'cannot see'	的 de

The topicalised versions mean:

"Essential things, the eyes cannot see" or
"Essential things, (a person) cannot see with the eyes"

These two sentence patterns are used by 23 translations (about half of the total). Sixteen are based on 用眼睛 yòng yǎnjing ('with the eyes'), seven are based on 眼睛 yǎnjing as the subject of the sentence. As we will see, below, however, 11 translators topicalise 'essential things' but frame other elements in the sentence.

The reason for favouring this sentence pattern is obvious. Framing 看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn with shi ... de places it in exactly the same position as invisible in French. The sentence thus follows the order and elements of the original French. Indeed, it may even be something of a habit among translators to translate French or English predicative adjectives, such as invisible, using the shi ... de construction. Shi ... de is very commonly used with predicative adjectives in Chinese (e.g., see here), and it provides a very natural equivalent to predicative adjectives in Western languages.

(Interestingly, more than two-thirds of translators using this pattern follow the original French/English by treating the eyes as an instrument. The tendency is most notable in translations from the English. One could not be blamed for suspecting that direct translation of 'to the eyes' may be involved.)

In addition, one translator deletes the topic altogether as being understood from the previous sentence.

OMITTING THE TOPIC
TOPIC	Prep. phrase	shi	Verb	de
X	光凭眼睛 guāng píng yǎnjing 'only with the eyes'	是 shì	看不到 kàn-bu-dào 'cannot see'	的 de

Framing other elements

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Apart from 看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'cannot see', 是 ... 的 shì ... de is also used by a number of translators to frame other segments of the sentence.

1. Invisible to the eyes: Seven translators move 眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eyes' inside the frame, virtually treating 'invisible to the eyes' as a single unit:

'INVISIBLE TO THE EYES'
TOPIC	shi	Subject	Verb	de
本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'	是 shì	眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eyes'	看不见 kàn-bu-jiàn 'can't see'	的 de

For some reason this pattern is found only with 'eyes' as subject. It isn't found with the instrumental.

2. Not visible to the eyes: Four translators take the negative element outside the frame and use 不是 bú shì ('is not') instead of 是 shì. As a result, the content inside 是 ... 的 shì...de is positive. The content inside the frame is 眼睛看得见 yǎnjing kàn-de-jiàn 'the eyes can see'.

PUTTING THE NEGATIVE OUTSIDE THE FRAME
	TOPIC	bu shi	Subject		Verb	de
	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'	不是 bú shì	眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eye'		看得见 kàn-de-jiàn 'can see'	的 de
	TOPIC	bu shi	Subject	Prep. phrase	Verb	de
(with instrumental)	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential things'	不是 bú shì	Omitted	用眼睛 yòng yǎnjing 'with the eye'	看得见 kàn-de-jiàn 'can see'	的 de

所 suǒ

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所 suǒ is a particle, one of the most difficult to use for non-native speakers. It indicates that the following verb takes an object. For example, in this phrase:

我所爱的人
Wǒ suǒ ài de rén
'The person that I love'

所 suǒ indicates that 爱 ài takes an object, and that object is 人 rén.

In this case, the structure is similar, except that the object has been omitted.

最主要的要点是眼睛所看不见的。
Zuì zhǔyào de yàodiǎn shì yǎnjing suǒ kàn-bu-jiàn de.

'The most important key point is (what) the eyes can't see.' It can be understood as: 眼睛所看不见 ( 的东西 ) yǎnjing suǒ kàn-bu-jiàn (de dōngxi) '(thing) that the eyes can't see'.

Other translations using 所 suǒ can be found at More

Significance of variation

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Despite the existence of variation among sentence patterns, the net result in a majority of cases is to reproduce something very close to the sentence pattern of the original French and English, with l'essentiel as the topic, and the focus of shi ... de placed on either invisible, invisible pour les yeux, or visible pour les yeux (negated).

The exception is that set of sentences that we saw above where l'essentiel has not been topicalised. However, this sentence pattern is accepted in Chinese as being completely interchangeable with the topicalised version and, while not reproducing the word order of the original French or English, is regarded as quite normal and natural.

What is truly intriguing is the fact that the range of variation and distribution of types is very similar between translations from the English and the French! A full list of sentences in each type can be found at popups for French-based translations , English-based translations , and translations of unknown provenance .

2. EXPRESSION

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L'essentiel / 'what is essential'

Translators use two patterns to translate the word l'essentiel 'what is essential'. (There are two translators who don't use any word to translate 'essential' in this sentence, because it already appears in the previous sentence.)

Type I	ESSENTIAL THINGS	本质的东西 běnzhì de dōngxi 'essential thing'
	or
Type II	THE ESSENCE OF THINGS	事物的本质 shìwu de běnzhì 'essence of things'

Despite the rather large conceptual gap between the two, in actual use the difference is not large.

Much more significant is the difference within Type I between translations that mean essential things and those that mean (very) important things. More

'The eyes'

Although most translators use 眼睛 yǎnjing 'eye' to translate 'eyes', there is some variation in translation. There is also some variation in the word used to render 'with' (where translators use an instrumental). Some translators add a word meaning 'only' ('only with the eyes'). More

'Cannot see'

37 out of 48 translations use a straightforward negative potential 看不見 / 看不见 (or 看不到) kàn-bu-jiàn (or kàn-bu-dào) to translate 'invisible'. However, there is some variation in this.

A few translators use 无法看见 wúfǎ kànjiàn 'no way to see' or 'not possible to see' in preference to the negative potential. 不可能看到 bù kěnéng kàndào 'not possible to see' is also found.

In addition, there are, of course, a few translations, as we saw above, where the negative element is paired with 是 shì, as in 不是能看得到的 bù shì néng kàn-de-dào de 'is not able to be seen'. In addition, there is the pattern dealt with below using 非...所见 fēi ... suǒjiàn 'cannot see'. More

3. EXCEPTIONAL PATTERNS

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Translation not using 是 ... 的 shì ... de

One translator doesn't use 是 ... 的 shì ... de at all. This translator uses a more classical-sounding construction.

	TOPIC				Subject		Verb
	重要的东西 zhòngyào de dōngxi, 'important things'		并 bìng	非 fēi 'is not'	眼睛 yǎnjing 'the eye'	所 suǒ	见 jiàn 'see'

This uses 非 fēi 'not', a classical-sounding form, in preference to modern 不是 bú shì 'is not'.

The form 非眼睛所见 fēi yǎnjìng sǔo jiàn stands out from the rest for its use of Classical-style Chinese.

Negation is by 非 fēi, not by 不 bù.
见 jiàn is a fully fledged verb in its own right, not a part of an expression such as 看见 kànjiàn or 见到 jiàndào.
The formal or literary particle 所 suǒ is used (see below).
And there is no use of 是 ... 的 shì ... de, which is a vernacular expression.

并 bìng is an emphatic form used before a negative. Using 并 bìng serves to emphasise that the eyes can NOT see essential things, forming a contrast with the previous sentence stating that only the heart can see clearly.