Simply marvellous Bhante. 
Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu. 
Bhante your mind’s just going to be (must already be I bet) feeling soooo inspired and happy doing this!!! 
Much Mudita and Gratitude!!! Woo hoo!!!
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Thank you for your response Bhante.
I don’t have problem with dukkha as suffering although I have read from some scholars things like to translate dukkha only as suffering does not cover what the Buddha really intented by explaining what dukkha really is (Is interesting how for example Thanissaro Bhikkhu translate dukkha as stress). This one is also interesting: Leigh Brasington translates Dukkha as a bummer hehehehe 
(Dukkha is A Bummer)
But with mindfulness geee I’m not sure. There is a company called Mindfulness Consulting here in Colombia and they define mindfulness as the human capacity to bring the attention to the present moment and quietly observe what is happening inside and outside of ourselves, without trying to change, delete or judge it.
Curiously they don’t even bother to translate mindfulness into spanish (mm I wonder why…). But, If we look at the common translations of mindfulness into spanish you find this one: Atención plena/Atención consciente which means something like bare attention or conscious attention and as far as I know, probably I’m mistaken, it has nothing to do with sati as memory, recollection, to remember, etc., right?
Ven. Dhammavuddho Thero uses the word mindfulness, full awareness, alertness for sampajañña, and recollection for sati.
Question: Sampajañña is alertness/ full awareness but not bare attention, correct?
Yes, there are some translations I have gather from some scholars:
- dukkha: bummer, stress, unsatisfactory/unsatisfactoriness, bad space, anxiety, discomfort, unease
- metta: good will, loving friendliness, benevolence
- right view: harmonious perspective, proper view
- right thought: harmonious imaging/goal visualization, proper orientation/attitude, resolve
- right speech: harmonious communication, proper speech
- right action: harmonious movement, proper action, conduct
- right livelihood: harmonious lifestyle, proper livelihood
- right effort: harmonious practice, proper endeavor
- right mindfulness: harmonious observation/attentiveness, proper remembrance/recollection, frame of reference
- right concentration: harmonious collectedness/equilibrium, proper composure, mental repose
- Jhana: levels of understanding, stages of meditation, states of mind, stability
- Aggregate: I saw one teaching of Ajahn Brahmali giving another translation for aggregate…I think it was something like group but I don’t remember hehe
- vedana: tone of experience
If I found or remember other translations I will tell you, hope that helps!
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Found more hehe
The word Samma means ‘proper’, ‘whole’, ‘thorough’, ‘integral’, ‘complete’, and ‘perfect’ - related to English ‘summit’ - It does not necessarily mean ‘right’, as opposed to ‘wrong’. However it is often translated as “right” which can send a less than accurate message. For instance the opposite of ‘Right Awareness’ is not necessarily ‘Wrong Awareness’. It may simply be incomplete. Use of the word ‘right’ may make for a neat or consistent list of qualities in translations. The down side is that it can give the impression that the Path is a narrow and moralistic approach to the spiritual life. I use variant interpretations so you consider the depth of meanings. What do these things mean in your life right now?
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Samma-Ditthi — Complete or Perfect Vision
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Samma-Sankappa — Perfected Emotion or Aspiration
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Samma-Vaca — Perfected or whole Speech
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Samma-Kammanta — Integral Action.
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Samma-Vayama — Complete or Full Effort, Energy or Vitality
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Samma-Sati — Complete or Thorough Awareness
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Samma-Samadhi — Full, Integral or Holistic Samadhi.
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Thanks, I will bear these in mind. Everything is open right now, I am playing with different approaches so we’ll see what sticks.
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Cool Bhante, it was a pleasure.
I have a question about one of your stated goals for your translation. It is commendable that you want to use plain and simple language, and that you want to make your translation easily readable by those not highly skilled in English. But isn’t trying to achieve such a goal a bit risky? Could using language that is very plain fail to provide a translation with the subtlety and details it needs to be accurate? I worry that too much desire for a translation to be fun and easy to read will result in a translation that doesn’t reflect the fullness and richness of the original text.
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The thing is that Nikayas positively recognize wrong or false aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path factors, as expounded in the Mahacattarisaka sutta (MN 117) and Dvedhavitakka sutta (MN 19).
So at least in certain contexts if the word samma is countered with the word miccha, i reckon it is indeed to be understood as ‘right’
Reinventing the WHEEL, instead of letting it spin?
(exuse the pun)
With a professional translation background I feel the need to add some points, on which I have probably not reflected thoroughly enough:
“I aim to use the simplest, most direct language possible.” This will undoubtedly lead to you (subconsciously) interpreting the texts, adding a certain slant.
Given that your monastic training (and therefore your understanding of Pali) has been shaped according to the curriculum set by the 10th Thai patriarch in 1920, which is known to place emphasis on a rather odd interpretation of buddhism (and its implied support of Thai monarchism), there may be a real danger of getting off the rails at some point, or rather tending to the “perceived wisdom” of the school you have been trained in. Will there be any outside (i.e. independent, non-Buddhist) quality control?
(I shall not dwell on the fact that the Hinayana canon is NOT “what Buddha said,” but what the Theravadins – by the way a school that was not fully shaped before the 5th century, therefore not a synonym for Hinayana – but a collection of orally transmitted mnemonically edited texts in a different language, Pali that is, instead of Prakit – if one can say that existed. Looking at the huge differences between biblical texts, which were only compiled 40-80 years after the alleged death of the prophet, one can simply not assume that the Pali canon contains more than the essence of Buddhas teachings, in which case philological nitpicking becomes pointless. This certainly being a point on which I disagree with Hans Gruber.)
The prime example for an incorrect Eglsih translation being widely disseminated (and its mistakes thus perpetuated) is of course Horner’s translation of the Vinaya, in Anglo-American academia still frequently cited, although it is (or at least could be) known to those quoting, that she omitted and/or deliberatly mistranslated various sections (mainly those regarding to “deviant” sexual behaviour according to her Victorian morals).
After almost 25 years of translating Japanese, a language with limited grammer, I am not one to quibble over finer points of grammar (there never was Japanese or Chinese Panini).
Additional danger will be in Re-translating your finished product will of course diminish the quality additionally, such effects are well known. From English (a language with litte Grammar, to something more complex – it doesn’t have to be Estonian with its 16 cases. At least for German (foremost Neumann) and French high-quality translations already exist aplenty.
To sum up: Is this project really necessary? (Your answer will likely be “yes,” as you have set your mind attached to it) or may the result cause confusion in those reading the finished product – there additional obstacles on their WAY?
Rephrasing the question above: Will the resulting material really ease the WAY for readers, or is it just an exercise born from the desire to produce it?
Henry
PS: I can’t resist pointing at another contradiction (fully aware that my attachement to the ancient Greek concept of logos is an obstacle here): “In accordance with 2500 years of Buddhist tradition, the translation will be entirely free of copyright restrictions.“ I presume a CC notice is found in the same section of the Vinaya as the bit about the Buddha’s use of a Swiss watch to determine the exact time when forest monks insist that they must finish eating at 12.00 sharp.
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Indeed dear friend 
Thanks for posting this, and allow me to explain in a little detail. Essentially my idea is to make it as simple as possible, but no simpler. Simplicity itself is not an aim; removing unnecessary obstacles to understanding is.
Let me take one phrase as an example. This is taken from SN 12.51, with Ven Bodhi’s translation. I am choosing this not because it deserves criticism, but because it is the best available.
Apuññañce saṅkhāraṃ abhisaṅkharoti, apuññūpagaṃ hoti viññāṇaṃ.
if he generates a demeritorious volitional formation, consciousness fares on to the demeritorious.
This is in the context of dependent origination. Let’s analyze the Pali as translated by Ven Bodhi, then I will propose a “simple” version.
Here is a discussion of the substantive terms.
- apuñña: rendered as 'demeritorious". But puñña is a common everyday word in Pali, while demeritorious not so much. We do get “demerit points” for speeding, so it’s not totally obscure. However auto-analysis suggests that only some English speakers will likely know this word. Moreover, the examples for usage of the term on wordnik are from a Hindu book, a book on 18th century Scottish philosophy, and the Summa Theologica. So we’ve turned an everyday word into something obscure, and for what? Do we actually gain anything from this? I think not.
- saṅkhāra: Another important everyday word, this has a variety of nuances and should be translated in a variety of ways. Here it means essentially “intention, moral choice”. Notice a couple of things about Ven Bodhi’s rendering. He translates what is essentially the same word in two totally different ways in the same sentence, using “generates” and “volitional formations”. The two words are, it is true, distinguished by the prefix abhi-, but that hardly does anything. Basically we have the verb and noun form of the same word, a common construction in Pali (and it is not uncommon for Ven Bodhi to translate such constructions in this way). “Generates” is a fine rendering, “volitional formations” not so much. It is pure Buddhist Hybrid English; google the exact phrase and only Buddhist references come up. This might be acceptable if it were an idea unique to Buddhism, but it isn’t. It just means “moral choices or intentions”, and is a basic concept in any language. The use of “formations” is intended to tie this onto other renderings of saṅkhāra used in other contexts. But it does that job very badly, sacrificing readability for an obscure terminological consistency. This is a holdover from the translation project of Ven Nyanamoli, which heavily influenced the basis of Ven Bodhi’s style. In my opinion, saṅkhāra simply doesn’t mean “formation”, whatever this is supposed to mean anyway. Ven Bodhi has changed this to “activity” in the Anguttara (a rendering I used previously, and urged him to adopt), however “volitional activities” is not much more comprehensible.
-upaga: Rendered as “fares on to”, and combined with “the demeritorious”. Once again this is an alien, unidiomatic, and highly formal way of rendering a simple concept. It needs a slightly more idiomatic approach. - viññāṅa: I’m not entirely happy with this rendering, and have experimented with “cognition” before; perhaps “awareness” would be best. But I am not ready to change it yet.
There is a further rendering problem, one that is more stylistic. The sentence begins by mentioning a purisapuggala, rendered as a “person”. Fair enough; but we notice that purisa means specifically male; and the nouns are likewise masculine. Yet there is, of course, nothing exclusively male about the passage, and this is just the normal way that Pali defaults to the masculine gender. This is a purely grammatical convention; and the relevant grammatical convention in modern English is to use gender-neutral language as far as is possible. There is no one right way to do this. You could use “one”, but that is distancing and formal. You could use “they”, which is normal in spoken English, and quite acceptable in written; also “you” is common in such constructs, and more engaging. I’ll pick “they”, remembering that the passage has already spoken of “a person”, so there will be no confusion in the number.
So I’d suggest translating like this:
If they make a bad choice, consciousness goes to a bad place.
This is, I hope you agree, much more comprehensible. It means the actual thing it says, in language that might be used by an actual English speaker. It is no less precise than Ven Bodhi’s rendering, using a syntax that mirrors the Pali exactly. In fact, it sticks closer to the Pali in using common renderings of common words, and also in not using a phrase to render a word.
The rendering “a bad place” is meant to take account of the fact that what is spoken of here is the process of rebirth: bad kamma leads to a bad rebirth.
It loses, perhaps, some cross-context consistency in that saṅkhāra would be rendered differently elsewhere, but we have already seen that this aim is not really achievable, even within the confines of a single phrase. The terminological consistency project is, in the final analysis, only useful for people who want to learn Pali. For someone who is simply reading the texts it is irrelevant, even potentially misleading.
When you read a passage that forces language into such constructions as “volitional formations”, it conveys a sense that there is a rigorous terminological consistency, an important matter for which readability must have been sacrificed. Yet the reality is that terms have different meanings in different contexts, and the spectrum of these meanings does not map in any simple way across languages. If you want to point out that the word used here is the same word used with a different meaning in, say, aniccā vata saṅkhārā (“all conditions are impermanent”), then point it out. But you don’t need to know this to understand what the passage means.
Ven Bodhi has, in the Anguttara, already severed the connection between these two meanings, since saṅkhāra in this sense is rendered as “conditioned phenomena” whereas in Dependent Origination he uses “volitional activities”.
At the end of the day you can only be partially consistent, as we have seen, so it is arguably less misleading to render in a more idiomatic form that doesn’t subconsciously try to persuade the reader that the text literally renders the Pali. Better, in my opinion, to translate idiomatically, and use the possibilities of a digital text to enable an interested the reader to easily see what the actual Pali used is.
Anyway, there are many more considerations, and things obviously get more complex when you are rendering large bodies of text. But hopefully this conveys something of the approach I am using.
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I’m astonished that you would say this, being a translator yourself. All translation is interpretation. There is nothing neutral about being literal, it imposes just as much on the text, only in a different way; see my remarks in my previous comment.
No it hasn’t, I have never even read these textbooks, and hardly even know anyone who has. They were fine for their time, but by today’s standards they are not very good, and are only kept in use because of the Thai veneration for their royal family.
Such as? I am friends with many of the best academic Pali/Indological scholars in the world, and in fact will be meeting one of them this afternoon to discuss this project. But there is effectively no-one with the time to undertake an extensive review of a large body of work such as this. That is why I aim to release it openly, and improve it as time goes on.
This is why Ven Brahmali has undertaken a new translation of the Vinaya, the first parts of which are available on SuttaCentral. He and I share a similar translation philosophy, although of course that doesn’t mean we’ll always do things the same way.
Obviously; but this is already happening. Our aim is to make it happen better.
This is no contradiction: the entire Buddhist tradition has indeed operated free of copyright. Copyright has only been introduced into international law in the last century or so. The difference is that today, translation work is legally copyrighted as soon as it is published, so unless you explicitly say it is free of copyright, you own the rights to it.
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Well, having provided some food for thought (which was replied to) I have now come accross some loevly guidelines (originally drawn up 1977):
Filiality: The Human Source (Uncorrected OCR from archive.org)
"Buddhist Text Translation Society [California]
Eight Regulations
A translator must free himself or herself from
the motives of personal fame and reputation.
A translator must cultivate an attitude free
from arrogance and conceit?.
A translator must refrain from aggrandizing
himself or herself and denigrating others.
A translator must not establish himself or
herself as the standard of correctness and
suppress the work, of others with his or her
faultfinding.
A translator must take the Buddha -mind
as his or her own mind .
A translator must use the wisdom of the
5 elective Dharma Ige to determine true
principles.
A translator must request the llder Virtu-
ous Ones of the ten directions to certify
his or her translations.
A translator must endeavor to propagate
the teachings hy printing s ut r as, s has tra
texts, and vmaya texts when the trans-
lations are certified as being correct.
- Namo Bodhisattva Who Regards the Sounds of the World "
With regards to your question regarding quality control may I suggest for starters
- Wikipedia: “Translation-quality standards” which is a start but heavy on dry theory, (“2 links only” therefore copy & paste for that one)
- The EU translation service’s, thoughts on the matter.
Being aware of all the above ought to help in the endeavour – best of luck for what is to be a fair bit of work.
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Thanks for the guidelines and tips, I will bear these in mind. The truest goal of translation, I think, is transparency: stay out of the way as much as possible. So I am looking forward to an extensive training in not-self!
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Dear Bhante,
I for one would greatly appreciate the new translation, with respect and gratitude to Bhikkhu Bodhi for all the wonderful work that he has done. But take me as example, I don’t use words that takes a person to look the meaning up. Sometimes when I read the translations I have to open up a second screen to look up the meaning 
From my perspective, I am not trying to learn “big” words but would just like to understand what is being taught in a simple and easy to comprehend kind of way. I just want to learn the teachings in a way that I may be able to explain it to someone without confounding them. If I wanted to learn “big” words, I would just go back to school but frankly I have no need of further schooling as what I’ve learnt at school was so different from the life experiences I have gone through. They never prepared me for the reality of life, at least that’s just my take on it.
The Bhagava encouraged the use of the local lingo when giving the teachings. I am confident that when there’s an easier and simple translation, it would be easier for the masses to read. There is no need for flowery words when it comes to the teachings. My Pali is at beginners level but I can see that the early text don’t have any flowery words, only simple easy to understand words. So why don’t we follow suit and can’t we have something similar? The Buddha always taught by example and there is evidence enough that he did use simple and easy to understand words when conveying his teachings. The whole of Buddhism is grounded in simplicity.
There is not enough words to convey my gratitude to you or anyone for having the compassion in undertaking this endeavor.
with respect and gratitude,
russ
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Thank you for that explanation. It seems you are attempting to walk a middle path between confusingly complicated language and oversimplified language. I was hoping that you would be using such an approach. On a side note, you mentioned how translating Pali brings up gender issues and I want to say something about that. I have always found it fascinating that some languages make a great issue of gender. It is just plain unnecessary for people to live that way. Many languages don’t have any gender specific pronouns or nouns and the speakers of those languages have been surviving just fine for thousands of years. One of the languages I grew up speaking is gender neutral and it never seemed strange to me to use the same word for he and she and the same word for him and her. Using words like he, she, him and her is just one style of speaking and using gender neutral words is just another style of speaking. I wonder if such linguistic issues say something about our species. I wonder why the human species has wasted much of its time and energy thinking about gender.
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Thanks for the support!
In translation theory, there are different approaches, which are suitable for different cases. Think about someone translating Shakespeare, compared to someone translating a set of instructions for operating a dishwasher.
Now, if you’re translating Shakespeare, you want to capture the feel, the rhythm, the color, the rich, unexpected playing on words, and all of that stuff. And you know that you’ll never get it even close to the original, but you try. You mimic syntax; in Thai, for example, you might try to mimic Shakespears characteristic conjunction of Germanic with Latinate constructions by using native Thai and Sanskritic forms, and so on. The point is that it is all about the experience of reading.
If you’re translating instructions for a dishwasher, none of this matters. Only one thing matters: can the person use the machine? So you don’t care at all about the syntax, the language, the forms: you only want to convey the meaning. In some cases the meaning might adapt to different cultures, perhaps, depending on the type of water that is available, for example (just as Chinese translators sometimes translated “mango” as “peach”.) But at the end of the day, all that matters is: can anyone wash their dishes? If you give the manual to someone and they successfully use it to operate the machine, you’ve done your job.
I think the Suttas have been translated rather more like one would translate Shakespeare, whereas, strange as it may seem, they are more like dishwasher instructions. All that matters is: do they get you where you need to go? Trying to represent the linguistic details of syntax and the like in English, in general, doesn’t help with this. There are exceptions—no rule is absolute—but overall the main emphasis in the Suttas is on practical comprehension, on the purpose of the Dhamma, not on linguistic forms. Even most of the verses are merely didactic restatements of the prose, and literary beauty for its own sake is rare.
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I agree completely about the way language handles gender. We should try to translate the texts in a way that gender becomes no more visible than it needs to be.
It is curious that gender is so hardwired into many languages, whereas it is actually unnecessary for communication, as the existence of ungendered languages prove. I wonder whether this ultimately stems from a baby’s first words, “mama” and “dada”, making a distinction that has somehow persisted in the roots of linguistic forms?
Dear Bhante,
Sadhu! Sadhu! Sadhu! Very well explained. I am in agreement with you that the suttas are like an instruction manual or like a trouble shooting guide even 
Much of the complications of over-thinking what the suttas really say will be greatly reduced and easier for the practitioner to use when translated in a simple and concise manner.
with respect and gratitude,
russ
Dear Armen,
I share the same similar language experience with you. The Insular SEA dialect I grew up using until my teenage years before we immigrated to the US did not have gender specific pronouns and nouns. We don’t have a word for “s/he”. We simply don’t have that concept. Also, I discovered that before the Spaniards came, colonized and imposed their religion and ways to the country I was born in, my ancestors had a strong matriarchal society where women held equal status as the men of the community and sometimes held more power than the men. Moreover, it is quite interesting that my research also showed that homosexuals played a special role in the society and they were never treated badly or discriminated upon until the colonists came.
with añjali and metta ,
russ
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These types of questions sound like they would make the basis for a very interesting research study. I wish I had the time and resources to conduct such a study. Oh well, maybe in the future I will be able to look more deeply into such issues.
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