We’re working on that. Currently I am translating the four nikayas into English on a segmented basis. Check out the discussions here on “pootle” and “segment”. Let me know if you want to check out our translation software at https://pootle.suttacentral.net, we can give you an account.
I’ll be translating consistently across the four nikayas, at least.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with some variety of interpretation, and the line between interpretation and error is not always easy to draw.
The biggest issue, to my mind, is the poor quality of translations generally. While we have seen a very large expansion of the numbers of translations available, in many cases they could do with improvement.
In terms of the resources offered by SC, such as dictionaries, it would be good to correct known errors.
This will be possible with the segmented texts. Once it is working, all texts will be aligned segment by segment. Sharing a common ID, it will be easy to view the same segment in various languages. This will, however, only be possible for texts tranlated on our Pootle software, or those that have been adapted for it (as Vimala is currently doing for the new Vinaya translation.)
The bigger problem here, in my view, is that the Thai translations need a serious update. Perhaps @Dheerayupa would like to weigh in here. But I would love to see a modern, “plain Thai” translation, dispensing with the artificial Pali and Sanskritic forms and the excessive formalizations, and dare to have the Buddha speak as he does in the Pali: like a human being.
I agree, I would love to see something like this. For example, we might develop an interface so that you could select a text or a range of texts, and analyze features such as word length, sentence length, vocabulary, word proximity, sentiment, grammatical forms, and so on.
The problem is that to do this well requires the hard work: an accurate Pali grammar parser. Such a thing doesn’t exist, so far as I’m aware. This is a hard piece of NLP programming. Currently we use a series of hacks to identify different forms of a Pali term, but it falls a long way short of a proper grammar parser.
Sad but true!
It really depends on your area of interest. Having said which, most of the things you’ve mentioned are already in our pipeline. The holdup here is not the developers, but the translator. That’s me!
And by the way, this conversation is getting too technical for the watercooler, so let me take it over to meta/dev.