Thirty-Six Stratagems: Bilingual Edition, English and Chinese 三十六計: The Art of War Companion, Chinese Strategy Classic, Includes Pinyin by Sun Bin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a collection of idioms on strategy with brief explanatory commentaries on each. The idioms, themselves, are thought-provoking and worth studying, but the book is problematic in a couple of regards. First, some of the work seems to either be plagiarized or has been plagiarized. Let me explain that accusation, because the actual thirty-six stratagems are clearly in the public domain, dating to the Sixth Century AD. However, while checking out the Wikipedia site to learn more about the author (incidentally, attribution of this work to Sun Bin is not accepted by consensus,) I discovered that the whole English translation of commentaries is verbatim the same as in Wikipedia. (Wikipedia has a tag on the article that it may contain original research and solicits further information.) I further noticed that the commentaries aren’t straight translations of the original Chinese text, but rather are reformulations written to be understandable to a present-day reader of English with no particular insight to Classical Chinese culture and history (which they are.) I can’t say whose work it is or whether it isn’t a misunderstanding that would be cleared up with additional information, but my point is that I wouldn’t recommend forking over any money to the publisher without knowing that the actual work (not the copy / pasting, but the intellectual work) either belongs to them or is in the public domain. Especially, given that it’s freely available on the internet.

That brings me to a second problem, a problem that is clearly on the publisher. There is a very limited sense in which this is a bilingual edition. Yes, the idioms themselves are presented in Chinese characters with pinyin as promised, but the commentary is wholly in English. The idioms, themselves, are largely Chengyu and other forms of Chinese idiom (so 4 characters, give or take, are all that is in Chinese for each.) So, if you’re purchasing this book to work on learning to read Chinese, it’s of limited benefit, and you’ll have to go elsewhere to get the Chinese commentary.

There is an appendix that explains a little about Classical Chinese. I can’t say whether this is original work or exists elsewhere on the internet. I can say that it also isn’t presented in a bilingual fashion either, excepting a few characters for some of the vocabulary. The appendix does have some interesting information.

My recommendation to readers would be not to buy this text when you can read both the Chinese and the exact English translation on Wikipedia for free. My recommendation to the publisher would be, if the commentaries are their original work, to put in a complaint to Wikipedia to pull it as copyright infringement. (And if they were the ones who lifted the text, to stop it already.)

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