I guess it’s inevitable that the sentence order differs from the original. Thank you for the explanation, Ayya 
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Hi Dhammapiya,
Thanks for the question. Several folks have given good answers already, but let me just briefly comment.
Bilara is designed for translators to create a new generation of translations. It’s a webapp that streamlines the process of translation so that translators can simply add their words and everything else is handled by the system.
It’s not designed for adapting pre-existing translations, and I do not recommend it for that purpose. It is a lot of hard work for little gain, and it defeats the purpose of the app, which, to reiterate, is to promote the development of a new generation of translations, not to provide a platform for old translations.
For over a decade, SuttaCentral has supplied what I believe is the largest ever corpus of translations in many, many of the world’s languages. We call these our “legacy” translations. We will continue to do so indefinitely. Back in the day, we made considerable efforts to get Korean translations, but did not succeed in some cases. So I’m really happy to see this interest.
If you want to proceed, I’d recommend adding existing Korean translations as legacy texts. To do this, the source files have to be converted to a simple HTML template, then just dropped into SuttaCentral and they’ll work.
The CC0 license is indeed mandatory. It means that the entire corpus is clean of any copyright claims in perpetuity. Lacking this, there will always be claims, counterclaims, and complexities (as we have faced in our legacy texts). CC0 essentially says, “Whatever you do with this text, we will not take you to court.” If people use the texts for things we don’t like (eg. for AI) we can ask them to stop, but we will not legally coerce them. This gives freedom and confidence to developers who wish to build on top of Bilara data.
That may be so. There are, I believe, legitimate commercial uses. For example, my translations are for sale on Audible, where the publisher employed professional voice actors to read them. But if someone wishes to enforce no commercial use, they cannot use Bilara on SC.
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Thank you very much for the detailed explanation, Bhante. I will discuss the CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) aspect with the translators moving forward. ()
For now, I would like to register the already secured translations (such as the Dhammapada) as ‘legacy’ versions. Could you please guide me on how to do this? ()
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No worries, I’m always happy to see progress on the Suttas!
Basically we simply need a set of HTML files prepared to the SuttaCentral template. Then we simply upload them, that’s it.
If you have some basic skills (i.e. if words like “HTML”, “regex” and “text editor” don’t scare you) you can do it yourself, and we can check the result. Otherwise we can find a volunteer. It’s not a long job for someone who knows what they’re doing. Preparing the Dhammapada would be maybe 30 minutes, depending on the source file.
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I am finding the guide a bit difficult to follow because I don’t quite understand HTML yet.
Could you please send me a completed example for reference? ()
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@dhammapiya, if you are not familiar with HTML, then it is probably going to be very difficult for you to work on this. Is anyone else on your team familiar with HTML/Regex?
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Yes, here’s the thing, if you want to learn, then great, this is a good chance, and the skills are very basic and transferable. But if you’re not interested, that’s fine also, we can help out.
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If there is a completed example, I think I can try following it, bhante
Here is a Japanese translation of the Dhammapada:
And here is an English that has verses split into lines:
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Thank you! I will study by looking at the completed example file.
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