(We recently had some update on the settings structure, and some terms in the Romanian version are still waiting to be edited; what you see here is a screen shot of our staging server.)
You can’t listen to Romanian sutta translations yet. In order for this to become possible it would need segmented translations in your language. So far this is only the case for English and (partly) German. And Pali, of course. But you can listen to suttas in any language while still seeing the website in your own language. For those who like using their ears.
This is not particularly sutta related but many of you here are familiar with Ajahn Brahm’s “The basic method of meditation.” We have just published the Romanian translation for online reading here.
@sabbamitta, roughly speaking how much work would this involve? I recently borrowed a semi-professional(?) microphone for a similar purpose so I’m willing to put some time into this.
Hi Naga, thank you that you are interested in helping with some work to make the Suttas more accessible in Romanian!
If you speak of a microphone, I understand that the kind of help you are thinking of is to make recordings of existing translations that could be used by Voice to play along with the text.
I should perhaps give some background information about Voice and some technical features of how the Suttas are presented that have an impact here.
SuttaCentral hosts two types of texts, namely segmented texts and so-called legacy texts. Segmented texts are texts (root texts and translations) that are broken into small pieces, called segments. These pieces all have their individual ID and can be matched between languages. To give you an example, I am posting an excerpt from SN 12.23 here in bilingual view:
(Oh … it seems the screen shot is not really displaying today; I think there are problems with uploading files currently. In case you can’t see it here, please look on the SuttaCentral website and activate “line by line” under “view original text with translation” in the settings.)
This segmenting has been done across the entire Pali canon for the root texts, and Bhante Sujato’s English translations are following these same segments. That is why they can be matched together as you can see it in my example. Several translators have started projects to do the same for their languages; and all other translations that don’t follow this segment structure are called “legacy translations”.
The existing Romanian translations are legacy translations, not segmented translations.
For Voice to fully support a translation with all functions, segmented translations are needed. For other translations, Voice is not able to display them next to the Pali, nor would the search function or the “inspire me” function work. You would have to know which Sutta you want to listen to and enter that Sutta ID, for example MN 1, into the search field.
Your microphone would come into play when it comes to give a voice to the Romanian translations. I am not sure if it is worthwhile to take this effort for legacy translations that can only enjoy a very limited functionality in Voice? Apart from that, AWS, the provider where we have our reading voices from, also offers a Romanian robot voice. Her name is Carmen, and here she speaks the first two verses in SN 2.4 for you:
(Well, here too it will take time for the uploading to happen; just be patient.)
Recording the existing Romanian translations would be one thing—it would offer an alternative voice to Carmen. Given that there are not so many translations available in Romanian, that task is certainly limited. You can have a look on SuttaCentral: Set the website language to Romanian, and then you see green dots in the left sidebar everywhere where there are translations in that language. This way you can get an overview how many texts there are.
But what would have a much greater impact would be making segmented translations. If you ask how much time one should estimate for that—well, I am doing that for German, and I am counting with a period of ten years perhaps, if things are going well …
Does this answer your question?
Naga, I have been checking the entire thread now again (it’s already a while ago since I last saw it …), and I see that there is already an ongoing translation project. In that case I am wondering whether it would be worth the effort to transform this into a Bilara translation project—Bilara being the computer assisted translation app developed by SuttaCentral in order to support segmented translations.
Yes, thank you for the exhaustive explanation. That puts things into perspective for me.
Perhaps I should provide some context. At the moment what I am translating and posting on dhammadha.ro are suttas and books which I have studied myself and found of use. I use the process of translation as a way of deepening my practice. An old friend who happens to be a translator is helping me with the translations, but I am not coordinating with other Romanian Theravada groups since I am somewhat geographically isolated and my practice has also been likewise mostly solitary.
This is one of the reasons why I requested that the translated suttas on Dhammadha.ro be included on SuttaCentral; to place them under the patronage of the Sangha and ensure that the little that we have here survives the volatility of groups and personal projects until there is a formal Sangha presence here.
Perhaps not. The initial plan was to translate and record Ven. Ayya Khema’s guided metta meditations - with whom you’re probably familiar with - so I will probably stick to that. I also have a personal motivation since my audience is everyone’s favourite person - mom. So this is more of a school project than a hardcore scholarly work.
Good plan! I also hope I will be able to get the ball rolling towards ordination next year and be able to dedicate more time to Dhamma projects… so we’ll be in touch.
Translating Ayya Khema’s guided meditations is of course a very different project than translating Suttas from the Pali canon—and certainly a lovely one!
That’s indeed very sweet! Especially that your mom is open to the Dhamma, in a country where this is in no way familiar, and from a generation who has probably never heard much about Buddhism. Wishing you the best of luck with this audience of yours!
Weeeell, I’m a person that there’s no harm in going to, but as it happens, I did stop volunteering for SC a little over a year ago.
That said, if it’s only a couple of suttas and nothing significant has changed in the way legacy texts are prepared (…Bhante @sujato, I’m lookin’ at you…?) I’d be happy to code them up and open a PR for you.
Also, I don’t know if it was mentioned earlier in the thread, but if not you might be interested in Bilara, SC’s fancy-pants translation engine.
Hey, thanks a lot, @Aminah. I think I could also create a PR by following the HTML structure of the previously added translations if that is all that’s needed for publishing.
So this is more of a school project than a hardcore scholarly work. 
Good plan! I also hope I will be able to get the ball rolling towards ordination next year and be able to dedicate more time to Dhamma projects… so we’ll be in touch.
