Robert Eno, "Guanzi : The Inner Enterprise", 2005 www.indiana.edu/~p374/Neiye.pdf Translations often differ significantly because there are at least five early manuscripts to draw upon, dating from around 1300 to 1600 AD. In addition, Chinese scholars in the last few centuries have made many suggested modifications to the existing original sources. Attempting to reverse centuries of possible transcription errors, they replaced many symbols which apparently make no sense with symbols that have a very similar shape and/or sound (often to complete a rhyme), and whose meaning seemed more appropriate. To make matters worse, there are no readily available printed copies of the oldest manuscripts in their original form, so the Chinese symbols used for this work came from various web sites and were cross-referenced against Roth's book (below). Every care has been taken to ensure that the symbols used here are correct, but how accurately they match the original manuscripts is unknown. The Translation Process ----------------------- Often, translators just try to get the general "feel" of what the Chinese is trying to say, and then write an English sentence that means about the same thing. What I tried to do (for no other reason than to see if it could be done) was to preserve as much of the original Chinese as possible by always using each symbol in the English sentence, and an exact translation of each symbol wherever possible, with as few added English words as possible. This sometimes results in sentences that are somewhat stilted in English, but that I hope retain more of the original Chinese way of thinking. I also tried to use the same English word for the same Chinese symbol whenever possible, so that the English reader could better see what the writer(s) were trying to say. Occasionally more than one English meaning for a symbol fits equally well, and the translator must pick just one. However, I sometimes took both meanings and combined them into a single phrase, such as "heart/mind", or "fair and just". Exact translations are interpreted when they either don't make as much sense literally, or when the resulting phrase would be awkward in English. The approach used here for the corrected symbols was to always use the original symbol whenever possible, and only use a suggested correction when the original symbol makes no sense.