"drawing" and "painting"

On Weibo or Microblog, the Chinese social network, the blogger 芝加哥艺术博物馆 (Art Museum of Chicago) made a posting about Claude Monet, and quoted him say "I never had one [studio] and personally I don’t understand why [people] would want to shut themselves up in some room. Maybe for drawing, sure, but not for painting" (my bold text), and offered a Chinese translation as "我从来没有过画室，我也不明白为什么要把自己关起来。也许是为了绘画，但不是为了绘画". Other than missing "people", the English quote is grammatically correct, and more or less faithful to the original quote in French.[note]

But the confusing part of the Chinese translation is 绘画. Its first occurrence is for "drawing", the second for "painting". What's the difference between drawing and painting (or dessiner and peindre in French)? Drawing is more about creating art with dry or somewhat dry materials, with a pencil, pen, charcoal, etc. Painting, which reminds us of painting a room or a car, is more about creating art with wet materials, including paint and acrylic. Secondly, drawing focuses on the outline while painting on colors. Lastly, drawing is traditionally black and white while painting must have various colors. These differences I list here are obviously not hard and fast rules, especially in modern art. (Note: Monet died about a century ago.) You can find other people's opinions with a Google search.

What about the Chinese words for "drawing" and "painting"? The Wikipedia page for drawing has its Chinese page titled 素描, literally "black-and-white outline", and that for painting has the Chinese page 绘画. This latter Chinese word is translated as both "drawing" and "painting" in English. Etymologically, both 绘 and 画 emphasize drawing more than painting. But as we discuss earlier, it's wrong to find the modern meaning in the original meaning of a word; we should only find its meaning as the word is used today. On the other hand, 素描 precludes the possibility of colored outline, which, needless to say, was indeed rare in Monet's times.

So, how do we translate Monet's words into Chinese, making a distinction between "drawing" and "painting"? Unfortunately, in spite of splendid Chinese culture and civilization, the vocabulary of the Chinese language is not rich enough to expose this nuance in what Monet tried to convey. A less than perfect translation of his words, judging by the context, may be "(关在画室里)打画稿可以，画一幅画不行" (literally, "(shutting oneself up in a room/studio), making a sketch is OK, making a painting is not OK"). This is a roundabout way to paraphrase Monet and it depends on my understanding of his attitude toward nature and his personal way to represent nature. Until we artificially designate one Chinese word for "drawing" and the other for "painting", the sentence cannot be literally translated. If we do go for 素描 for "drawing" and 绘画 for "painting", the Chinese reader will definitely get confused, unless a translator's note is given to that effect.

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[note] "Mon atelier ! Mais je n'ai jamais eu d'atelier, moi, je ne comprends pas qu'on s'enferme dans une chambre. Pour dessiner, oui : pour peindre, non" (source: Wikipedia. Note there is no word for "maybe" as in the English translation, which misses the word "studio", and renders "oui" as "sure" instead of "yes".

Do not use etymology to determine current meaning of a word

It may sound obvious. When you want to know the meaning of a word, you look it up in a dictionary and check the definitions, probably with some examples. Only if you're interested in its origin will you check its etymology. But in reality, we see that a lot of people trying to explain the connotations or nuances of meanings of a word resort to etymology. For example, in my 2017 blog 自由: "freedom" or "liberty"?, I criticized those who rack their brains trying to come up with certain semantic differences between freedom and liberty while there is none (although which word is more customarily used in which set phrase exhibits a difference in frequency).

Recently, in a Weibo posting, a Chinese blogger tried to justify his translation of draconian as "惨无人道" ("inhumanely atrocious"). He was reading the following passage of an MIT Technology Review article Every country wants a covid-19 vaccine. Who will get it first?,

"By then, though, China had a different problem: not enough covid-19. Its draconian lockdown measures had quashed the virus at home so effectively that doctors couldn’t find patients to fully test their vaccine on."

His comment is, "这里特别用到一个极其恶毒的词语叫draconian，可以翻译为惨无人道" ("An extremely vicious word is used here called draconian, which can be translated as inhumanely atrocious"). When other readers pointed out to him that his understanding of this word was incorrect, he justified his interpretation by finding the origin of draconian, which is the Athenian lawmaker named Draco, known for making harsh laws.

So much for this story. Let's re-read the renowned linguist Thomas Pyles's frequently quoted statement that "[t]here is a widespread belief, held even by some quite learned people, that the way to find out what a word means is to find out what it previously meant — or, preferably, if it were possible to do so, what it originally meant--a notion similar to the Greek belief in the etymon... such an appeal to etymology to determine present meaning is as unreliable as would be an appeal to spelling to determine modern pronunciation." (The Origins and Development of the English Language, 1964 ed., pp304-5). Not heeding this warning, we would say calculate only if we were to count pebbles because calculate comes from Latin calx ("stone"), and we would either quarantine potential SARS-CoV-2 virus carriers for 40 instead of 14 days or flatly refuse to use the word quarantine because the word inherently meant "forty".