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thing is if you read any of the existing translations, you will see a strong bias toward whatever the person doing the translating liked to think about. The first one I read was from a business person, then there are the mystics, and on and on and on. You can't get an accurate reading of this particular book from anyone who has translated it because they all suffer from the same thing you fear: that their misunderstanding of the language had them reading things in that may not have been in the original.
That said, you do have a valid point that if you do it from scratch with little or no knowledge, you risk the same mistakes and worse.
But that depends too, on how well you are willing to question your own interpretations I guess.
I'll be honest I went ahead and translated it anyway. I still have very little knowledge of chinese. I was very bold at the time, I consulted both a chinese AND a japanese dictionary for the symbols. On the theory that the literal meaning of the words wasn't important, the general tendency of what the words were pointing to was at issue. In that sense I felt I had an advantage over other translators... not being so stuck in the trees that I couldn't look for the forest.
I'm satisfied with my own translation, but can I say it is without bias? Probably not. It was still fun to do...
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