> I could easily believe this would result in a product that is a more faithful conversion to English than many translations. It's interesting to think about how this in some ways can combine and synthesize various subjectivities over time in a way that you actually couldn't do if you read the original language and believed your "own" take on the original translation was the "correct" one!

The problem with that is that you can "creatively interpret" meaning into the text that wasn't there in the original. [ADDED: Not trying to imply she was deliberately mistranslating it, just that it's very easy to think about a word's varied meanings in your own language and not only miss the connected meanings in the other language, but also see false connections that were never there.] Leaving aside the problems with classical Chinese for a moment, the problem is that words in languages map to concepts in our heads, and these rarely correspond exactly to another word in another language. Take "computer", we might say "ordinateur" in French or "电脑" (literally "electric brain") in Mandarin but neither of these translations are able to capture the older meaning in English of a person who calculates something, which would be "calculateur" in French or "计算着" (lit. "person who calculates") in Mandarin.

Going to the text again, the main word is 道 which means way, path, principle, etc. and many more. These are usually translated as way for this text, but just that word alone has many other meanings in English that wouldn't be translated back into Chinese as 道 - for instance "way" in English could mean "method" or "possibility", but neither would make sense as a translation for 道. Another way of looking at it might be the colour chart for men vs women, which is meant as a joke but has a serious side showing that some groups of people split up and categorise things very differently.

What I dislike about her first line is the word "real". The translation is already kind of "out there" a bit (in line with some of the ones I listed in another post as possible interpretations due to the textual ambiguities, but which differed a lot from how most people interpreted the text). To me, "real" isn't implied by any of the words. I can see how she got there, because 道 is understood as "the one true way", but as a mental abstraction from a physical path that you should walk done to live life safely, to the "path" that you should walk spiritually to "not stray off the path". The problem is that none of the words in the text are concerned about truth vs lies, reality vs imaginary, rather this abstract concept of "the way". To translate "isn't the real way" she is using 非 for "not/isn't", seemingly completely ignoring 常 "always, constant, often, usual" and imbuing the already ambiguous 道 with another meaning that isn't really there.

[ADDED 2: Just re-reading this again, and it sounds a bit too critical. I think my point is not that her translation is "bad" or anything like that, and it can definitely be used to think about the text in ways that other translations might not lead you to. But I wouldn't use this as my primary source, and where her translation differs substantially from others it should be an indication that there's something particularly difficult to translate, and so you definitely need to consider other translations at that point and ask yourself why they are different.]