Please report any errors or typos!

[sujato]

@Charlotteannun

SO happy to catch one!

And happy to have you catching!

Just a general comment on this thread, we are still transitioning to our new translation platform, so I am waiting until that is ready, hopefully by the end of the year, before doing all these corrections. So please keep them coming!

@Charlotteannun

the dukkha of finding a sentence in the translated paragraph missing, and another sentence inserted there that is later implied but doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the Pali.

So yes, you end up resorting to some such strategies when you do anything that isn’t a purely literal word-for-word translation.

The approach I take with such passages is this.

The Pali has a passage that generally deals with the “situation” of the discussion. In the Pali, this says that the mendicant came to the Buddha, sat down, and spoke to him. It then follows on by repeating the whole passage in full.

Now, as a rule, I try to avoid repeating passages within suttas more than necessary. In this case the repetition seems unnecessary, so I leave it out. But the reader needs to know that the passage was repeated, so I say that. In many suttas, it will identify the speaker’s response, but in this case it is implied. Perhaps this is because the response (“Sādhu sādhu, bhikkhu”) is a common one. But I felt that the English was confusing without identifying the speaker, so I inserted that.

The question then becomes, where do you insert it? It could be in the last segment of the previous speaker’s utterance; or at the beginning of the Buddha’s response; or as part of the “situational” description. I choose to include it as part of the situational description, as it is semantically in the same ballpark as the Pali text: it’s a short phrase clarifying who is speaking to whom.

@Charlotteannun

Wouldn’t it be better if the inserted sentence were moved below the material left out in English and given parentheses to indicate that it doesn’t appear in the original text?

One of the things with our segmented translations is that generally speaking any translated text must correspond with something in the Pali. Usually the translation simply renders the Pali, but there are many exceptions, as there always must be when dealing with natural language. It is technically possible to insert extra segments in the translation that are not in the Pali, but this is complex and we try to reserve it for headings only.

On the use of parentheses:

False precision and the use of square brackets in translation

This point came up in another discussion, and I thought it might be worthwhile to say something about it in its own topic. The following is the recommendation and guidelines I follow for SC. In academic practice it is common to indicate supplied terms in translations with [square brackets]. I recommend always avoiding these, as they are unscientific, misleading, and ugly. They detract from the text and convey a misleading sense of false precision. If square brackets are to be used at all, th…

@sabbamitta

The discrepancy is that the degree of abbreviation is different in the root text and the translation. This is more obvious when viewing English/Pali line by line.

Right. And this is why we give the Pali so you can always see.