Weiyan is an attempt to get closer to Classical Chinese texts that resist translation.

Classical Chinese doesn't cross easily into English. The characters carry layers of meaning that don't survive the journey, and different translations of the same text can diverge widely — the gap between them isn't only a matter of word choice. Weiyan is a way of reading these texts more slowly and carefully than one person could on their own. The aim is to work through many Classical Chinese works, including ones that have never been translated into English.

How these translations are made

The translations are produced by an AI pipeline that mimics a real translation team. Each stage makes a distinct pass: an analyst reads the structure of a passage, a glosser works through it character by character, an entity recognizer tracks people, places, and titles, a translator drafts, a stylist shapes the English, an editor revises, and a consistency checker reconciles every term against the rest of the book. Its advantage isn't brilliance or speed. It's thoroughness — holding one glossary, one set of names, one standard of terminology across a whole text, the kind of consistency a person would find too tedious to sustain by hand.

The English is only part of what comes out. Along the way the pipeline builds glossaries, lists of entities, footnotes, and analysis of each passage — apparatus you can read alongside the translation to see how a line was understood.

Where the source is genuinely ambiguous, or where a rendering strains, the notes say so. The aim is not a definitive translation — there isn't one — but a careful, honest one that shows its work and admits its limits. I get closer. I don't arrive.

Who's behind it

I build Weiyan as a hobby project, after hours. I'm a software engineer, not a scholar — no formal training in Classical Chinese, not an expert, just someone trying to get closer to the text in front of me.

I tell the longer story of how it began in the first post on the blog. There I also write about building Weiyan: the problem of turning a translation team into software, what works and what doesn't, and the things these texts teach me as I work through them.

You can follow along by subscribing on the home page, or write to me at hello@weiyan.co.uk.