Pick up three English translations of the Tao Te Ching and you will often find three different books. Not three shades of the same sentence — different sentences, carrying different claims. I noticed this as an ordinary reader, long before I knew anything about Classical Chinese, and at first I assumed someone was simply getting it wrong.

The longer I looked, the clearer it became that the disagreement wasn’t carelessness. The gap is in the source. A single character can hold several meanings at once, and the grammar leaves open what English forces you to settle: when something happens, whether one thing or many, whether a word is naming or doing. The translator has to choose, and each choice closes a door the original leaves open.

The name of this project speaks to that difficulty. 微言 (wēiyán) is the first half of 微言大義 — subtle words with profound meaning. A great deal is held in very little, and carrying it across without flattening it is the whole challenge.

That challenge is what started this. I’m a software engineer, a husband and father; Weiyan is a hobby project I work on after hours. Eastern philosophy has been a lasting interest of mine — it began with Alan Watts, led me to Taoism, and from there to the Tao Te Ching, the text I kept returning to. I’ve no formal training in Chinese or in translation. I’m not an expert. I’m someone trying to get closer to a text that keeps resisting, and writing down what I find on the way.

Wanting to understand the text as closely as I could, I started building a tool to help. It began as a simple script and grew, over time, into an AI pipeline — a set of agents that mimic the workings of a real translation team.

It works the way that team would: an analyst reads the passage, a glosser works through the characters, an entity recognizer tracks the names, a translator drafts, a stylist shapes the prose, an editor revises, and a consistency checker reconciles each term against the rest of the book. Each makes a separate pass. Its advantage isn’t brilliance or speed — it’s thoroughness: one glossary, one register of names, one standard for how every term is rendered, held across an entire book, the kind of consistency a person would find too tedious to sustain.

The pipeline — the engine that does the translating — is almost ready to run its first full book, though it is still full of rough edges and features that could be improved.

What comes next is to point it at the Tao Te Ching — where this all began, and a good first text: short, canonical, and translated often enough that the divergence is easy to see for yourself. When it’s done, the translation will be published here on the site, free to read, with its notes and glossary beside it. Not as a definitive version — there isn’t one — but as one careful attempt with its workings shown.

This blog is where I’ll document the rest: the method, the passages that fight back, how the pipeline comes along, what breaks and what holds.

If you have thoughts or questions about how any of this works, I’d be glad to hear from you. You can write to me directly at hello@weiyan.co.uk.