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This article is about a military unit called the Shenji ying 神機營. Translating shen as "divine" and ying as "division" is fine (though there are other possible translations), but it makes no sense to render ji as "engine" in the early 15th century. Shenji meant something like "divine mechanism" or "divine instrument" and probably referred to the firearms themselves. I searched Google Books for "Divine Engine Division" and found only 5 results, all mirror pages of Wikipedia. [1] This means that not a single reliable source uses this translation of "Shenji ying".
I was hoping to find a standard translation in the scholarly literature, but I couldn't. The "Shenji ying" has been variously translated as "firearm brigade" (Chan Hok-lam in the Dictionary of Ming Biography [1976]), "Shen-chi Camp" (Edward Dreyer in Early Ming China [1982]), "Firearms Division" (Charles Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China [1985]), and "Artillery Camp" (Chan Hok-lam again, this time in the first Ming volume of the Cambridge History of China). All three scholars are major authorities on Ming history, so their books are all reliable sources.
Because there is no dominant translation in the secondary sources, I think we should just stick to the native Chinese name. Instead of opening a formal request for move that might take forever to get accepted because very few people are watching this page, I'm moving the page to Shenjiying directly, on the same model as Hushenying. If anyone disagrees, please revert and we'll do this through the formal channels! Madalibi ( talk) 15:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article is about a military unit called the Shenji ying 神機營. Translating shen as "divine" and ying as "division" is fine (though there are other possible translations), but it makes no sense to render ji as "engine" in the early 15th century. Shenji meant something like "divine mechanism" or "divine instrument" and probably referred to the firearms themselves. I searched Google Books for "Divine Engine Division" and found only 5 results, all mirror pages of Wikipedia. [1] This means that not a single reliable source uses this translation of "Shenji ying".
I was hoping to find a standard translation in the scholarly literature, but I couldn't. The "Shenji ying" has been variously translated as "firearm brigade" (Chan Hok-lam in the Dictionary of Ming Biography [1976]), "Shen-chi Camp" (Edward Dreyer in Early Ming China [1982]), "Firearms Division" (Charles Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China [1985]), and "Artillery Camp" (Chan Hok-lam again, this time in the first Ming volume of the Cambridge History of China). All three scholars are major authorities on Ming history, so their books are all reliable sources.
Because there is no dominant translation in the secondary sources, I think we should just stick to the native Chinese name. Instead of opening a formal request for move that might take forever to get accepted because very few people are watching this page, I'm moving the page to Shenjiying directly, on the same model as Hushenying. If anyone disagrees, please revert and we'll do this through the formal channels! Madalibi ( talk) 15:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)