Its simply a confusion in the terminology.
Shifu means literally 'Scholarly-Father' as in someone YOU (and its a personal address) take to be your adoptive father in the scholarly realm. It CAN be translated as master, but master as in the office of authority NOT as in an expert of a skill. These are different uses of the word master in English. It means master in the way you call the school coach the 'games master', or how you are master of your house. As in a position of authority, not a level of skill.
Now of course you could also say someone is a master of kung fu implying skill but that is a different use of the word master. Shifu does NOT confer that. To say that in Chinese you would say 'Haoshou' or 'Wulin Gaoshou' (an master/expert and grandmaster respectively, literally 'high hand').
In such a way ShiYe or any of the other terms, they also imply an office of authority, a kung fu family relation, not a level of skill. As long as you understand this then thats fine. In this way a grandmaster in a school is basically the headmaster.
In the dictionary grandmaster can be defined as the head of an order of chivalry which is kind of what the head of a kung fu clan is, after all the 'Wulin' is a kind of chivalrous fraternity. In such a way the term can be used but one must understand that it does NOT refer to skill but rather to authority. Since this is ambiguous in English I would suggest headmaster as an alternative.
And before anyone gets ideas of having their students refer to them as 'Wulin Gaoshou' this is NOT a title, no one would ever address you as it and you cannot call yourself it, it is used about you in the third person after you have won renown.
Last edited by RenDaHai; 09-25-2014 at 04:25 AM.
問「武」。曰:「克。」未達。曰:「勝己之私之謂克。」