Translation - Mencius 1.3: Do not violate the agricultural seasons.

I was working with some Mencius earlier, and it's good practice for reviving my training with Classical Chinese. Here's a good example:

不違農時，穀不可勝食也；數罟不入洿池，魚鼈不可勝食也

If you try to translate this as literally or directly as possible it gives you something like:

"Not violating [the] agricultural seasons, crops not possible victoriously eat. Numerous nets not in [the] stagnant waters (ponds?), fish [and] turtles not possible victoriously eat."

In classical Chinese the grammar often comes from the understood relationships in the sentence (subject/predicate and topic/comment). Other times there will be function words that provide grammar, but these often require understanding a complex conceptual relationship and knowing how to relate different parts to the whole. So, after thinking about this for a little while, I came to the following:

"Do not violate the agricultural seasons and you will not be able to successfully eat [all] the crops. Do not put numerous (too many) nets in the waters and you will not be able to successfully eat [all] the fish and turtles."

Legge boils this down some, embellishes some, and renders it like this:

"If you do not interfere with the busy seasons in the fields, then there will be more grain than the people can eat; if you do not allow nets with too fine a mesh to be used in large ponds, then there will be more fish and turtles than they can eat."

So, hopefully this provides some insight into the process: it takes not only knowing the words, but also being able to play with grammatical structures and conceptual relationships. And really, the grammar shapes the conceptual relationships, so knowing the different ways terms can relate is crucial. And this mostly comes from practice and learning the semantic structures.