Hello everyone! My friend @dhammagift starting publishing aligned Thanissaro Bhikhu’s translations to his website https://find.dhamma.gift/ and we thought it would be a great idea to publish them to SuttaCentral as well. They are already in SC’s JSON format, so no additional work needs to be done. As for licensing on https://www.dhammatalks.org/ I see that they use Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported License. I am not sure about compatibility of CC0 and this one, but I can write to the dhammatalk owners and see what they say.
Otherwise, I think I am ready whenever I get green light on this one .
@sujato@carmi do you have any additional thoughts/comments?
I’d wait to talk to them until Bhante Sujato comments. The license was only one of the reasons I think it wouldn’t be something he would want to do, but I can’t say.
Also, I can’t imagine them making an exception. Once they are available on SC as CC0, they are CC0 everywhere. That’s the whole point.
Hi, thanks for the offer! We are, as always, happy to host these translations in the HTML “legacy” format. However, as noted, we require CC0 for our Bilara segmented texts.
The reason for this is that in the past we’ve had to deal with a wide variety of license requirements, which then ends up being a hassle that is perpetuated down through the flow of the data whenever it is used.
For example, while generally I am in favor of making things freely available, I think there are exceptions. Eg., my translations are on Audible, where the cost of the readings pay for the voice actors who did the work. In this case, I agreed to this, because it lets us get on this popular platform, with quality work from the actors. The main thing is that the license does not then restrict freely available versions.
If someone wishes to completely prohibit paid versions, I respect that, and perhaps it is ultimately the better option. But for us, it’s CC0.
I don’t know if this has been covered already for earlier ports, but it would be good to add canonical link tags back to source URLs for “legacy” texts when possible. Particularly in this case, where there’s a clear digitized version available elsewhere. It helps make sure that search engines don’t get confused by the duplicate content.
non-bilara segmented texts
It might make sense to start considering options for texts that were segmented independently, outside of Bilara. As there seem to be a growing number getting segmented in one way or another.
Just throwing it out there, for example, as a separate repo or a new folder in sc-data.
re: more translations in English
Bhante @sujato, is there any chance you could clarify this policy when it comes to languages which already have complete translations? As in, you had previously stated:
That was 4 years ago, and was specific to Ven. Thanissaro’s translations too.
Here’s a more recent statement from 2 years ago, which has been made elsewhere too (such as on GitHub):
I’m not sure if my quotes are too dated or your thoughts have changed on the topic, but it would be helpful to get some clarity to avoid misunderstandings
One way to interpret all 3 together may be that it’s not something staff would work on or that you would encourage, but if anyone really wants to do it, it also wouldn’t be declined?
small example
Just adding a small tidbit below to illustrate how it can be helpful for us volunteers, contributors, etc to be able to reference your past decisions for clarity about what makes sense to spend time on etc:
I considered the same task of getting more of Ven. Thanissaro’s translations ported to SC, and at one point even considered collecting every translation I could find from any author in one place (although Citation Helper helps with indexing some of the digitized ones already). Particularly for historical archival purposes.
But when I read through your past statements, it seemed to me that such a task wouldn’t necessarily align with SC’s goals – at least not when a complete translation already exists – and I should perhaps spend my time on other tasks (which I have and still am).
sure, these can be added to the <head> of the html files.
No, sorry, it’s too complicated.
That’s pretty much it. We’re happy to add new legacy translations. It’s very simple for us, just throw them in the relevant folder and that’s it. So long as someone wants to prepare the files, that’s fine. It’s not a priority for us, however, and there won’t be new features for legacy texts. Eg., they’ll never be part of the Editions program.
The main thing we’re interested in is really the support for new translations on Bilara. So if you, or anyone else, is thinking of things to do (thanks!) then the first question would be, “how can I support translations on Bilara?”
For the last few years I’ve been focusing on building the new app for that, which has taken a lot longer than I thought! But it seems close to ready now. So the next question is, how do we support people in that work? And that’s something I’d like to consider more carefully in the next while.
I’ve been primarily working with Ven. Jhanarato on maintenance, refactoring, and improving automation and testing of the main SC repo the past couple months. Since HongDa is very close to finishing up Bilara v2, I didn’t want to interrupt his work there (which we briefly discussed in PM), and will see what I can help with development-wise at a later date.
But tasks like porting texts don’t necessarily overlap with development, as the complexity is quite different.
Particularly for someone with a chronic illness like me, some days my brain can refactor a whole codebase, and other days writing some HTML is all I can muster.
Similar for folks of varying skill levels and experience.
The new(?) proofreader role might be something of interest to more people who perhaps have enough strength in a language to proofread, but not necessarily enough between two languages to be confident in their own idiomatic translations. It was something I was thinking about as I’ve helped with technical writing in FOSS a good bit, plus there’s some very diligent readers in the typos thread!
Something like that could also possibly make for a training pipeline for new translators too – i.e. by starting as assistants.
(Although certainly that wouldn’t be the same as another experienced translator reviewing the whole work)
.
