I’ve been accumulating a few direct translations of suttas in the last few years and have forgotten to send them here. (‘Accumulating’ oversells it, I think…)
I know the translation project and Bilara have evolved a lot and I apologise for not keeping up to date with this. But we could either publish these new ones old-style or I could match them with the Pali – I could also do this with my old translations already published here.
I tend to abbreviate, so I’d see how this affects segmentation.
submit HTML files (or files to be converted to HTML): easy, but those files are limited and static
input to Bilara: slow and bit boring, but in the end the text will be much more flexible and widely applied.
Note that all our future development is focussed solely on Bilara texts. We’ll continue to support plain HTML indefinitely, but they’ll just be served on the web, that’s all.
With Bilara you get:
text and translation
online editor which has features like matching translation strings
also support for comments
compare translations in different languages
exact and universal reference system
content can be extracted and flexibly reused (bilara i/o)
may be added to sc-voice for audio
become a candidate for publication in books, epubs, etc.
and so on.
I’d say if you want to develop an ongoing translation project, definitely use Bilara. If you’ve just got a few translations you’d like to get online, then plain HTML will be fine. Just remember, the only way to get texts into Bilara is to paste them carefully, line by line. There are no shortcuts!
I’m undoubtedly underestimating the complexity, but it’s unclear to me why it’s not possible to mark up a translation text with the segment IDs, and have a script that creates input for your Bilara i/o utility. It would obviously be a lot of work to type in the IDs, but those are in the current files, so those could be automatically generated as long as each line corresponded to a different ID.
I have some practical experience attempting to do this. It isn’t a better option because:
It takes as much time to mark up a translation as it does to cut and paste segments into the Bilara app
You then spend extra writing a script, fixing its bugs, and then checking for and fixes errors in the underlying data files the script created. The Bilara app does that for you when you use it.
Sometimes technology causes more trouble than it helps.
Thank you, bhante. At the moment I cannot think of a translation project as such, but every now and then I translate a discourse for the purposes of teaching or sharing, so it’s probably better to just submit plain HTML for now. Who is handling translation submissions at the moment?
We don’t have a dedicated person for that RN. May I ask, what form the translations will be in? If you’re able to submit preoperly formed SC-compliant HTML, you can do it via a pull request on Github. Otherwise, send me a PM.
