Well, there’s a number of issues here.
We always have to bear in mind that there’s no “proper” meaning of a word. Words have meanings in context. So you can have a word in a sentence and look it up in a dictionary, and it gives you half a dozen different meanings. Anyone working on dictionaries will tell you how inadequate they are. And anyone in the field of Pali and Buddhist studies will tell you that there is no complete and reliable Pali dictionary.
And the reader has to decide: what meaning applies in this case? The job of a translator is, as an expert, to make a considered judgment on what meaning applies in what context. Do we always get it right? No, we do not. Do we get it right more often than someone just reading a text and looking up a dictionary would? I bloody hope so, else why are we doing this job!
I don’t think dukkha is problematic to translate. It means “suffering”. Other people have different opinions: I think they’re wrong. It’s my duty as a translator to have opinions about these things.
Who are we to try to force a reader to do anything? We should be grateful that our readers have given us their precious time and attention, and treat them with gentleness and respect. Our calling is to respond to a reader, to reach out to them, to help them with kindness and compassion. If we do our job well, and communicate the Dhamma in a meaningful and intriguing way, a certain percentage of readers will be interested to look further. Great!
We should be encouraging curiosity in readers, and to do that, we need one thing: readers. Write for your readers, not at them.
Really? Let me see, hmm …
- arhat: Buddhists have been arguing about the meaning of this since the earliest days, and it was the key issue in the first schism. I translate arhat as “perfected one”, which I think works fine in the context of the EBTs, but it would, of course, be rejected by all Mahayanists.
- nibbana: This means “extinguishment” or “quenching” yet most translators either just translate it wrongly (“unbinding”) or leave it untranslated.
- jhana: again, this is a highly controversial term. I translate it as “absorption”; but I really want to translate it as “illumination”.
- kamma: is almost always understood wrongly as “fate”.
I have commented on dukkha above. Sati has been translated just fine by mindfulness for a century. Mettā as “loving-kindness” is okay; I prefer just “love”, but this is purely stylistic, not out of any concern over the meaning.
My point here is that what one person thinks is controversial or difficult is not at all controversial for others. In my view, with few exceptions, the real reason why people choose to leave some terms untranslated is rarely linguistic, but has more to do with the doctrinal leanings of the translator. For every term that you might say is hard to translate, I could list a dozen Pali words that are just as problematic from a linguistic point of view, but which no reader has even heard of, and which every translator has somehow found a way to deal with. Again, that is our job, to solve these hard problems as best we can.
I made the decision to translate everything: otherwise, you’re leaving the translation half-baked. And I found that there were hardly any terms that really resisted translation. Brāhmaṇa is probably the only significant one, as we have no word for a “hereditary member of a caste claiming sacred origins but who may or may not perform priestly or spiritual duties”.
And finally, the bigger problem is that when you use Indic words, it’s not just a neutral act. By including Indic words, you’re sending a message that this word is special. The reader will almost inevitably overload it with meaning, and those meanings are informed by their own experience and background. People almost always make the mistake of assuming that Indic words have fixed and well-defined meanings. But they just don’t, any more than words in any other languages.
If you’re Thai, to “sit samadhi” simply means “to meditate”. According to the Yoga philosophy, it means “union with ultimate reality” or “enlightenment”. When you read the word samādhi in an English translation, your meaning depends on whether your influences are Indian or Thai. But the meaning in the EBTs is neither of these things. There, it means “to become immersed in an experience of bliss and light and oneness”. True, it’s not easy to convey this in translation, but we should at least try.
Sacred words, due to their doctrinal overloading, are in fact highly mutable in meaning. In Buddhism and the Indic sphere generally, they have undergone extremely rapid change in meaning under ideological pressure. Yoga means “spiritual striving” in Buddhism, “union with the divine” in Hinduism, and “stretching” in modern American/global culture. For 2,500 years, saṅgha meant “the community of ordained monastic followers of the Buddha”, and in the last couple of decades it has changed in secularist circles to “a local meditation group”.
I think this extreme mutability has to do with the fact that there are so few knowledgeable people in the area, so new meanings of words can proliferate rapidly.
All this is why we should avoid displacing meaning onto words, and keep the reader’s attention on sentences.