What is the purpose of translating the Bible into Sanskrit? What year was this done? Would it reach more readers than a Hindi translation would? (Forgive me if these questions are naive - it’s a new idea to me.)
The oldest Sanskrit Bibles are from the 1800s. It reaches an audiences of Hindutva & Vedic intelligentsia that otherwise would know little about Christianity, I think.
Its largely a poetical-cultural endeavour rather than proselytizing, it seems.
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Thank you for that interesting information. It leads me to wonder if there are Latin translations of the Koran. … which, of course there are. Wikipedia tells us that
Robertus Ketenensis produced the first Latin translation of the Qur’an in 1143.[1] His version was entitled Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete (“The law of Mahomet the false prophet”). The translation was made at the behest of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, and currently exists in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris. According to modern scholars[citation needed], the translation tended to “exaggerate harmless text to give it a nasty or licentious sting” and preferred improbable and unpleasant meanings over likely and decent ones.
Tut tut. … Apology for leading off topic.
id·i·o·mat·ic
ˌidēəˈmadik/
adjective
1.
using, containing, or denoting expressions that are natural to a native speaker.
So it’s not about “idioms” (like “its raining cats and dogs” etc), but simply about natural sounding language. Which is important if you want to communicate dharma to large numbers of people instead of to a small group who don’t care about the style or have pushed through it long enough to have internalized its idiosyncrasies.
Haha, we certainly don’t need to hear something like “the Buddha moved into the neighborhood”.
But maybe something like the New Living Translation (NLT)?
I still don’t see why idiomatic English translation is important. The book shelves are full of titles composed in highly idiomatic English that attempt to communicate the dhamma in countless styles and varieties of approaches.
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Yea and those books take all sorts of liberties and bring with them modern interpretations. Better to have a idiomatic, simple to read text that still communicates the core message of the suttas.
I honestly can’t see how this is not a good thing. Maybe we are just of two very different opinions here.
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I suppose my view is that any “translation” of the suttas that is rendered in fluid, idiomatic English would itself have to take so many liberties with the meaning of the texts that one might as well just read one of the many explanations of the dhamma instead. I think there is a reason why the previous translations have evolved their own unique hybrid English dialect for the job: because that’s the best they could do while being true to the meaning of the texts.
There is just no way of saying “kamma” in English.
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Check out this Old Testament. The red line of text is what I would temporarily call “Jewish Hybrid English” or more accurately “a Hebrew-English hybrid”, because it follows the Hebrew to the point of observing its seeming-backward word order.
It does this because it’s not really a translation. It is a grammatical parsing. It is designed to analyze the grammar of the text above it.
Now check out this interlinear Greek Bible if you are further interested. This is also not really a translation either, it is another parsing, or a translation designed to slavishly follow the original.
It can do this better & more closely, with the Greek than the Hebrew, because Greek is another Indo-European language.
I would very much like to see interlinear Pāli Canons much like the interlinear Bibles above.
Ven Sujato’s recent translation has a functionality that approaches this, which I use a lot, and find very helpful.
Lastly, if still interested, check out this Koran, notice how it has a lookup dictionary that is more detailed than SuttaCentral’s (
!!). It has both a traditional translation, and via hovering & that dictionary, it also has a grammatical parsing of the source text. You can also click on any word to hear it pronounced clearly, and every line has an exegetical analysis (this resource is less scholarly than the rest, and designed for religious catechism, but it still has amazing functionality that could easily be put to use in the manner similar to the above academic Christian resources).
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I suppose my view is that any “translation” of the suttas that is rendered in fluid, idiomatic English would itself have to take so many liberties with the meaning of the texts that one might as well just read one of the many explanations of the dhamma instead.
Yea, I can’t say I agree.
No translation will be exactly the same as the original, no translation is, but you can still preserve a lot of the meaning without whats called “formal equivalence” in modern translations studies.
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These interlinear translations, though, are for a niche audience.
I just happen to be the type of person who would fill that niche in a given religion though, I suspect, regardless of what I had leaned towards.
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Yes, but if there is one text that preserves a lot of meaning, and is stiff, awkward, and hybridized, and another text that preserves less meaning but is more fluent and linguistically pure, I think I would almost always prefer the former.
And I would agree, but for a large number of people, I suspect that is not the case and that they are put off from reading the suttas by such formal equivalence translation.
So why not both, the more the merrier.
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