nders, from which none can hope to be wholly exempt.
Omissions were frequent; hard passages were willfully distorted
or slurred over. Such offenses are less pardonable. They would
not be tolerated in any edition of a Latin or Greek classic, and
a similar standard of honesty ought to be insisted upon in
translations from Chinese." In 1908 a new edition of Capt.
Calthrop's translation was published in London. It was an
improvement on the first -- omissions filled up and numerous
mistakes corrected -- but new errors were created in the process.
Dr. Giles, in justifying his translation, wrote: "It was not
undertaken out of any inflated estimate of my own powers; but I
could not help feeling that Sun Tzu deserved a better fate than
had befallen him, and I knew that, at any rate, I could hardly
fail to improve on the work of my predecessors."
Clearly, Dr. Giles' work established much of the groundwork
for the work of later translators who published their own
editions. Of the later editions of the ART OF WAR I have
examined; two feature Giles' edited translation and notes, the
other two present the same basic information from the ancient
Chinese commentators found in the Giles edition. Of these four,
Giles' 1910 edition is the most scholarly and presents the reader
an incredible amount of information concerning Sun Tzu's text,
much more than any other translation.
The Giles' edition of the ART OF WAR, as stated above, was a
scholarly work. Dr. Giles was a leading sinologue at the time
and an assistant in the Department of Oriental Printed Books and
Manuscripts in the British Museum. Apparently he wanted to
produce a definitive edition, superior to anything else that
existed and perhaps something that would become a standard
translation. It was the best translation available for 50 years.
But apparently there was not much interest in Sun Tzu in English-
speaking countries since it took the start of the Second
World War to renew interest in his work. Several people
published unsatisfactory English translations of Sun Tzu. In
1944, Dr. Giles' translation was edited and published in the
United States in a series of military science books. But it
wasn't until 1963 that a good English translation (by Samuel B.
Griffith and still in print) was published that was an equal to
Giles' translation. While this translation is more lucid than
Dr. Giles' translation, it lacks his copious notes that make his
so in