Added suttas in Hindi, Sinhala, Finnish

Meta Updates
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I’ve now added several suttas in these languages:

  • 16 DN suttas in Sinhala. This is the AP de Soyza edition. The text was digitized by a team of volunteers coordinated by Ven Mettavihari and hosted on his site metta.lk for many years. However that site is now badly outdated, and the text is not in Unicode. The unicode conversion and markup was done by Janaka of pitaka.lk. I have adapted the first set of suttas for SuttaCentral, and more will follow.

  • 79 MN suttas in Hindi. This marks the first completed stage in a project to digitize and make available the wide range of Early Buddhist Texts that have been translated into modern Hindi. Few of these texts have been digitized, and none are easily accessible. These suttas are the first volume of the 1933 translation of MN by Rahul Sankrityayan, the astonishing Indian polymath of the last century.

  • 5 suttas in Finnish. These were translated by Tae Hye Sunim, a senior Finnish monk, who has taken ordination in both the Korean and Burmese traditions. These were supplied to me by Ven Mudito.

With these additions, we bring the total number of languages on SuttaCentral to 26. The Hindi and Sinhala collections constitute the final major sets of translations that we expect to include on SC in the forseeable future. There are many texts that are still to be added, but these consist of expansions to existing language collections.

I am not aware of any further available digital collections that are available. There are some translations that exist, but I don’t know of any digital source for them (Cambodian, Japanese.) In other cases the texts are not available due to copyright. In some cases the process of adding texts is ongoing (Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Hindi, Sinhala, Polish, German, French…) In yet other cases the process of translation is ongoing.

If you know of any sets of translated texts that you think might be suitable for SC, let us know.

5 Likes
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I would be glad to contribute by typing in Sinhala Unicode Bhante.

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Thanks so much, that’s very kind! I was just discussing with Janaka of pitaka.lk, and we agree that the Sinhalese texts could do with a round of careful proof-reading.

May I ask, do you have any experience that would be relevant for this?

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Venerable Sir… I am no Sinhala Scholar :disappointed: but got familiar with Sinhala typing using Unicode when I coordinated the translation of Ajahn Brahm’s book Kindfulness into Sinhala :smile: . Of course the language was simple in that book. What I had in mind is I could copy-type /Unicode convert–may be the first draft.

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Venerable Sir, I just experimented with Brahmajala Sutta (metta.lk). Converted it to Unicode using http://subasa.lk/converters/fm-abaya.php. There is editing to be done. What I thought is I could do the edits comparing with a printed Sutta Book (may be Venerable Mettavihari Thero will help me borrow a Sinhala Sutta book).

If this is something useful Venerable Sir, can you suggest a sutta that I could work on? It would be a waste if someone else is also working on the same sutta.

With Metta

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We may be interested in getting some typing done, but this is still not sure; we are trying to find out if there are digital texts available first.

So the immediate task, if you’re interested, is to read carefully through the suttas as they are and check them for spelling mistakes, punctuation, and other normal proofreading issues. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in?

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Don’t work with the metta.lk texts, use the ones on pitaka.lk. These are already unicode, and have some corrections made. I adapt these for SuttaCentral, which is a fairly simple process, as they are well structured already. Let me know if you want to download the files. They are in xml, so can be edited with any text editor.

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I just added the Anguttara threes to elevens in Sinhalese, will try to do the rest of AN tomorrow.

1 Like
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metta.lk is now working :slight_smile:

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Dear Indira ,
There are some translation errors of Sinhala . Can you correct them ?

See ;
Spelling errors in Sinhala Translations
You can use Google transliteration for Unicode typing ;

http://www.google.com/intl/si/inputtools/try/