We are a group of Theravāda Buddhists from South Korea. My name is Dhammapiya.
We are currently in the early stages of developing a Theravada Buddhist scripture application, utilizing data from SuttaCentral and various other sources. Our team consists of dedicated volunteers who have come together for this purpose.
Our goal is to create a platform where users can compare texts in Pali, English, Korean, and Burmese side-by-side. As I am personally studying Burmese, I find the segment-by-segment (line-by-line) comparison of the Bilara system very effective. Therefore, we would like to ask if it would be acceptable to use the Burmese scriptures available on SuttaCentral to implement a similar comparative feature in our app.
Regarding the alignment, we are aware that the sentence structure of Pali and its translations can differ. Thus, we are considering whether it might be more practical to align the texts at the paragraph level rather than by individual segments. We would deeply appreciate your advice or guidance on this technical aspect.
Furthermore, once we have organized and finalized the Korean translations for our project, we would be honored to share the data with you so that it may be contributed to SuttaCentral.
Thank you very much for your noble efforts in Dhamma-dana.
Every text on SuttaCentral is licensed under Creative Commons. You can view each text’s license by clicking on the ‘info’ button on the top left of any text, then scroll down to the licence section.
Ayya @sabbamitta are you the correct person to tag for Bilara translations?
Also tagging Bhante @sujato who might be able to help with some of your technical queries.
For the Burmese translation, the info is as follows:
Publication details
The Sutta Pitaka was translated from Pali by the Pitaka Myanmar Translation Department.
(ပိဋကတ်တော် မြန်မာပြန်ဌာနမှ သုတ္တန် ပိဋကတ်တော်ကို ပါဠိဘာသာမှ ပြန်ဆိုသည်။)
Printed and published by U Win Naing, Director of the Department of Religious Affairs.
(သာသနာရေး ဦးစီးဌာနမှ ညွန်ကြားရေးမှူး ဦးဝင်းနိုင်က ပုံနှိပ်ထုတ်ဝေသည်။)
Prepared for SuttaCentral by Nay Myo Win and John Nishinaga.
(Prepared for SuttaCentral by နေမျိုးဝင်း and John Nishinaga.)
Is this material suitable for the Bilara system? ()
I don’t think that those translations are currently in Bilara. They say ‘legacy’ next to the translation.
Texts which are already in Bilara have ‘aligned’ on their sutta card, in the navigation.
This means that someone would need to do the segmentation and alignment to match the Pali.
“Bhante, if there aren’t any copyright concerns, I think I could organize the Myanmar Bilara section while I work on my Korean app. I’m currently studying the Myanmar language, so I can translate and categorize the meanings. ()”
Ayya @Vimala and @Aminah might have some insight. They were responsible (along with others of course) for getting a lot of the legacy texts up on SuttaCentral.
My understanding is that many legacy texts had permission given to put on SuttaCentral without giving a general release. So unless a text says “for free distribution” or something like that, you have to assume permission has not been given.
You would need to contact the original publishers.
Bhante Sujato can please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe he is not interested in segmentizing legacy test. Instead the hope is that each language will have a newly translated segmented version on SuttaCentral.
Indeed, the legacy texts have copyright attached to them, dependent on their translator. Info should be found under the information button with the text.
I can help translators who have a project set up in Bilara if they encounter any problems when using it. And I can also help sorting out whether or not a text is suitable for bringing into Bilara. But that has basically been said already.
In this case there is indeed no copyright information provided in the info section.
The prerequisite for bringing a translation into Bilara would be a CC0 license. If we don’t have that, we can’t do it. I have no idea if any of the SuttaCentral volunteers has contact details of the translators; probably not. In case they are publishing their translations on their own website as well, copyright information, or contact information, may perhaps be found there (by someone who understands the language).
I also don’t know if the person who prepared the text for SuttaCentral, John Nishinaga, has a user account here on the forum so that you could contact them this way.
I think these texts still come from the legacy site, and I added them in 2014, nearly 12 years ago. I searched, but I no longer have the contact data.
I guess contacting the Department of Religious Affairs would be the right thing to do, asking for copyright permission. I have no clue how difficult that would be nowadays; in 2014, the situation in Burma was different. It might be easier for you to do the translations yourself. For this, you need a login to Bilara.
Have you just tried googling some of the names of the suttas in Burmese? By doing that I found this site: https://shwe.net/tipitaka/2.1.01_Silakkhandhavagga.htm. It has the phrase “ထို (ခရီး) ၌ သုပ္ပိယပရိဗိုဇ်သည် ဘုရား တရား သံဃာ၏ အပြစ်ကို များစွာသော အကြောင်းဖြင့် ပြော၏၊ သုပ္ပိယပရိ” which is identical to SuttaCentral
I don’t know if this gets you any closer to the owner, but you are going to have to dig around.
Then you can create the new translation directly in Bilara from the segmented Pali text.
But as you aren’t a native Burmese speaker, it might still be worthwhile finding the owners of the copyright first. On the other hand, segmenting an already existing translation for use in Bilara would also be a LOT of work!
