Can kanji-heavy Japanese be easily translated into Chinese?


How much is changed or lost in translating (say) an old Japanese text that's
mainly written in kanji into hanzi? How does it compare to translating into a
completely foreign language like English? I'm curious if I should pick up a
Chinese translation instead of an English translation of an old work because
it would be more faithful to the original, and I'd like to practice my
Chinese. But really I'm just plain curious; I'm not even sure if I will find a
complete translation, so it's just theoretical for now.

(I know close to nothing about Japanese, and the Dunning-Kruger effect is
keeping me from knowing how ignorant this question is.)




In the olden days Japanese scholarly works were written in
[漢文](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun), which is basically Classical
Chinese. Together with a set of annotation rules (e.g. "read the next two
characters backwards", "insert a particle here", etc.) it was possible to
translate/transcribe the resulting Chinese text into Japanese.

Nowadays, it would still be possible to render Japanese in 漢文, but would
require an easy translation. As modern Chinese is quite different from
Classical Chinese, finding a translation from 漢文 into Chinese is usually non-
trivial.

If the text you are considering was indeed written in 漢文, then you just need
to consider how close a modern Chinese translation would be to Classical
Chinese, which you probably know better than me. (As Axioplase points out, if
the text was written in 万葉仮名, then "kanji-heavy" means very little and the
answer is less obvious.)

I have read 五輪書 in English and a good part of it in Japanese. Any bigger book
store here in Tokyo will have a copy in contemporary Japanese and most also
carry the traditional text. I find the contemporary text easier to read, but
the traditional text is also quite readable. Although 五輪書 is not written in 漢文
itself, the text is very close to the Japanese that would have stemmed from a
漢文 "translation" into Japanese. That is to say, a translation into
漢文/Classical Chinese would be quite faithful to the original text. How close
that is to modern Chinese, I cannot say.

Personally, I didn't really like the English translation, so if I were able to
speak Chinese, I would give the Chinese translation a shot before trying to
read the English translation again...

