Example Of A Translation That Could Turn People Off Of Buddhism

I’ve posted on this earlier.

But in summary, nibbidā has a range of senses, from “revulsion” at one end to “boredom”, “disillusionment”, etc. To be clear, “revulsion” or “repulsion” is not an incorrect translation: in some contexts it must be rendered like this. So it’s a matter of the judgement of the translator as to what works in cases where the sense is less clearly defined.

I tried using more colloquial renderings like “weariness” or “boredom” but I couldn’t get them to work in doctrinal contexts, so currently I use “disillusionment”.

Well, kind of, but it would be better to say that words in different languages have different semantic scopes. Pali/English is no different than any other language pair.

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