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Building a New Cultural Bridge CA students lay a path for Latin learners in China and beyond As Julius Caesar’s army advanced through Gaul in the first century B.C.E, the Romans laid down roads and bridges on the march, paving supply lines for the empire. Classics teacher Elizabeth Penland ’89 likens the two-year labor of love some of her students undertook in translating a commentary on Caesar’s Gallic War into Mandarin to that ancient engineering feat. The text was the first resource for Chinese students of Latin to be released by Dickinson College Commentaries (DCC), which publishes Latin and Greek resources free of charge for public use. Penland believes a classical education should not just be the mark of the elite. “Anyone should be able to study Latin,” she says. With its peer-reviewed, crowdsourced approach, DCC is leading a charge to make the classics accessible to anyone with an internet connection. And despite an international trend of declining study of the classical humanities, thousands of students in China are learning Latin and ancient Greek. Many high schools, colleges, and universities rely on DCC commentaries, as does Penland. By aggregating generations of contextual notes, they reveal “a chain of interpretation, of teaching, and of use,” she says. “They help the text feel more like a cultural object that many people have read.” Penland was in the right place at the right time to get the CA translation project started. While attending the Conventiculum Dickinsoniense, an annual immersive oral Latin experience hosted by Dickinson College, in 2015, she talked with DCC project director Christopher Francese, who compiled the commentary. She mentioned the talented and passionate Latin students
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C O N C O R D ACA D E M Y M AGA Z I N E
Ken Lin ’18 and Nora Zhou ’17 in Oxford, England, during a spring 2016 “Roman Britain” trip that allowed CA students to see the impact of Caesar’s invasions on the British landscape.
who were entering CA’s program as native Mandarin speakers with training in ancient Chinese. He had just prioritized the translation work on Caesar, because it is core literature for the Advanced Placement exam in Latin. Once Penland had recruited students, Adam Bailey, head of modern and classical languages, and John Drew, assistant head of school and academic dean, offered their support. It seemed the perfect project to encourage research and independent thinking. Mandarin teacher Wenjun Kuai agreed to consult with students. “Wenjun is such a generous colleague and a wonderful teacher,” Penland says. “She did so much work on the Mandarin. The students had responsibility and a voice in how the project ran. Their group work was self-directed. It was a highly collaborative process, a model of linguistic research.”
The work took place entirely outside of class, and the students were supervised by a Chinese research editor assigned by DCC. In the first phase, Nora Zhou ’17 and Ken Lin ’18 oversaw the translation as student project leaders. Penland assembled groups of students, pairing EnglishLatin and Mandarin-English speakers. Some who knew both languages met in the middle. With Zhou and Lin, Rebecca Yang ’18, Helen Wu ’18, Jessica Ding ’17, Michael Qiu ’18, Ben Zide ’18, Anna Dibble ’18, and Lysie Jones ’18 all translated, and additional students provided project support. A friendly but intense competition emerged, thanks to weekly “brownie challenges” that earned baked goods from Penland. Lin, who completed numerous translations, says, “I’m not going to lie. It really motivated me.” By summer 2016, review began, with final edits arriving in the fall. Zide worked as an editorial assistant to Zhou and Lin. “He’s a fantastic classicist and did much of the coordinating and computing work to keep the project managed and formatted consistently,” Penland says. Working feverishly to meet a January 2017 deadline, the students completed the project on the first day of the Lunar New Year of the Rooster (and coincidentally, Lin’s birthday). The entire Latin program cheered on the project team. “They achieved something I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the like of,” Penland says. “It’s astounding to me what they did on their first effort.” Very different linguistic structures make translating between Latin, English, and Mandarin challenging. Zhou explains that both Latin and Mandarin can be quite concise, but in different ways. The Romans used concrete, detailed descriptions, whereas