The HH Dalai Lama has mentioned already that the Suttas in the Pali Canon should be translated into the Tibetan language. I hope to see this happen.
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I’m waking up this old thread to see if folks know if any progress on this has been made. Bhante Sujato mentioned something similar in a DM.
Also, the topic came up in one of the many “AI” threads about access to texts.
It seems like since translation and scholarship are both big things within the Tibetan tradition that someone would be working on this. Are there any Pali dictionaries or grammar books for Tibetan speakers?
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I know there are serious efforts in Dharamsala to get the Pali canon translated into TIbetan, and machine translation is an integral part of that project via monlam.ai which is powered by the Monlam/Mitra machine translation model. This is in sync with efforts to revitalize the Sanskrit->Tibetan translation efforts, and data collections and preperation for these tasks are on the way.
There are certainly good resources for Sanskrit<>Tibetan (i.e. Negi dictionary, and also the Dharmamitra system is pretty stable on this task since I collected a large dataset for that a while ago). I haven’t encountered dedicated Pali resources yet, which is a pity.
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Oh, I was specifically interested in human translations, sorry. It was your comments on machine translation that got me curious.
I guess the answer then is that post-edits is the most human that we will get with regards to the Pali canon in Tibetan, outside of that I am not aware of anything that is worth to mention.
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I guess I don’t understand the root of your fatalism. It’s as if the relative ease of machine translation makes it impossible for human translations to exist.
Or do you think that the interest level among Tibetan speakers (or at least non-English speaking Tibetan speakers) is so low that no one would ever want to do it?
No, I mean there is no inherent reason to regard post-edits as less prestigious or qualitatively valuable than human translations, so this is about as good as it will get, quality wise, and much better quantity-wise for the whole prospect of bringing the Pali texts into Tibetan. No fatalism on my side!
On a more practical note, since the models are now here, I don’t see a reason why anybody in that project wouldn’t want to use them. Anti-AI resentiments are not strong on Tibet (at least not with the parts of the community that I interacted), fundamental criticism is more of a thing among westerners (I have no hard numbers on this of course). I guess Geshe Monlam also did a good job getting the approval from key figures in the tradition, which is something that OpenAI, Anthropic etc. didn’t bother to do…
I’m thinking of actually learning Tibetan and doing it, a lot of people will appreciate it, since Tibet is a Buddhist country. But that might happen after my Greek translation project.
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