A Wealth of Collaborations: Translating the Parliament’s Global Ethic Declaration into Chinese

An international project like the Parliament’s signature document, “Towards a Global Ethic (An Initial Declaration),” goes global when translated from English into Chinese. Adopted by the Parliament in 1993, the Global Ethic as it is called, is a widely-collaborative expression of the basic ethical commitments already shared by the world’s religious and non-religious people. A team of professional English-to-Chinese translators led by the Parliament Trustee, Debra Boudreaux, recently made it possible for the Global Ethic’s commitments to be easily accessible to all those whose written language uses Chinese characters. The team discusses the challenges and opportunities they encountered during the work of translation, and discusses the reasons for some of their choices of ideas and characters.