Translating the Four Nikāyas

Dear Ven Bhante,

Thank you for your views which make a lot of sense & with which I do agree.

It occurred to me that another reason for using passive voice could be that it takes away any semblance on the presence of a self, even the presence of the “conventional I”. It is interesting that you mentioned “Pali uses the passive voice more…”. I wonder whether it was done deliberately by those Arahants, (when they wrote the Pali Canon, all those years ago), to send an additional message that there is no self but, only a process!

Just a thought, Bhante

With Metta,
Upasako

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This was the suggestion of Kalupahana, who saw a philosophical significance in this. Maybe, but at the same time, the Dhamma must conform to the language it’s expressed in. Perhaps in appropriate passages, where not-self was the defining feature, we could retain the passive voice.

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is it certain, bhante, that passive voice in the Nikayas is a conventional everyday colloquial language and not a deliberate choice?

this probably could be ascertained on the suttas where both doctrinal and belles-lettres parts are present, for example Sakkapanha sutta (DN 21).

Dear Venerable Sujato.

Best regards and wishes on your great effort. Wishing you a great success in the translation. May the Noble Triple Gems, the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, protect and bless you.

SADHU! SADHU! SADHU!

Venerable Phra Baidika Dr. K. Dhammadinna Thera,
Buddhist Maha Vihara,
Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia

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I wouldn’t read too much into it. The Buddha was not about hiding secret messages in grammatical forms; he was about telling it how it is. Of course there may be some contexts where it is significant, but I would not hold my breath.

In any case, this kind of linguistic nuance is exactly the kind of thing that can’t really be translated. Even if it has a certain feel to it one language, there’s no way that the use of a parallel kind of grammatical form has the same connotations in another language.

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Thanks so much, Bhante!

Dear Banthe
The first translation into French I would love to do is what I consider the core and possibly the oldest teachings of the Buddha, namely the Mahavagga from the SN.
Any chance for you to start with this Book in your translation project?
With Metta
alaber

It won’t make any difference. I won’t be releasing them until they are all done, (or I fail!), as i want to ensure consistency.

Given the cunning translation-assistance software being used, I was wondering how good the coupling between Pali and English would be .

At the moment there appears to be no simple way of figuring out how to find the Pali for a particular translation. It’s often helpful to look at what has actually been translated, and the Pali->English hover facility makes this useful even for those of us whose Pali skills are poor. However, for a sutta in the MN or DN, or even longer AN and SN suttas, it can be challenging to even locate the passage.

Cross referencing, at least on the paragraph level, would be very helpful. I’m not sure if it will go down further than that, but perhaps the translation-assistance software is smarter than I suspect.

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Thanks, this is a great question.

We will be marking up the texts in a language called PO, which is a standard for translations widely used in the open source world. Here’s an example of a PO file from my (very slowly progressing) translation of the Therigatha.

#: thig_lineseg.html+html.body.section.article.blockquote.div:16
msgid "“Sukhaṃ supāhi therike,"
msgstr "“Sleep softly, little nun,"

As you can see, there are three parts to this segment.

The first line is a comment, which in this case contains the HTML code. PO is not built to be interoperable with HTML, so what we do is stick the relevant HTML in a comment. That we we preserve SC’s HTML, and when the translation is finished, we just reverse the script and output perfect, SC-compliant HTML5. Since this is always clean, well-structured code, it is then (relatively) trivial to convert this to any other encoding format, such as LaTeX, epub, and so on, if that is desired. But the main thing that translators will do is simply press a button and produce a file that can be directly uploaded to SuttaCentral. No more worrying about converting Word documents and other hellspawn to something useful.

The second line, “msgid”, contains the original text in Pali. As you can see, this has been segmented. As this is a verse, we have broken it into lines. The segmenting can, however, be based on any feature of the text. Most probably we will break on sentences, perhaps colons and semicolons as well, for prose, and lines for verse. That means the text is broken into natural semantic units (assuming that the source text is well proofed and well punctuated, which for our Pali text is the case). Occasionally this doesn’t work; for example, in some verses you need to translate the lines out of order, or mix the lines. That’s okay, it just means that the text and translation don’t match 100%. No natural language process can ever be completely consistent, but the point is that it be useful. However, on the whole it works to translate in this way, as it corresponds to natural semantic structures in the language, as opposed, for example, to word by word translation, which would never work, apart from anything else, because the word order is so different. So segment by segment is basically the smallest unit that is usable for translation.

Finally, the msgstr line contains the translated English line. Once you have translated this, it goes into a memory bank, and the next time this segment occurs in the Pali, it will pop up a suggestion reminding you how you translated this previously. So you just go, click, and the second occurrence is added. As you can imagine, in repetitive text like the Pali canon, this saves a lot of time, and greatly helps ensure consistency. Moreover, this is a fuzzy function: it’ll tell you it’s found, say, a 92% match and an 86% match, and let you choose which to use, and modify it if you wish.

When you export the finished translation, it is simple to then include an ID tag for each segment. So even though the exported files are quite separate, we can recognize the related segments in each file. This can then be displayed in various ways, depending how you want. You can, for example, make it show the underlying Pali text by hovering or clicking a segment (Google translate does this). Or you could arrange the text line by line, or in parallel columns. Or all of the above, which in fact we plan to do, as there are many different ways people like to read.

You can also use this for checking alternate translations, in the same or different languages, as long as the segmented markup is the same.

Having such detailed hard-coded correspondences at a segment level then opens up a number of other possibilities, many of which we are only beginning to understand:

  • High-level semantic text analysis of sentiment or other characteristics based on the English text, which could an indicator of systematic characteristics in the Pali that we cannot now discern.
  • Finely tuned machine translation from the English into minority languages, using a list of technical terms to ensure accuracy of doctrine, while the English provides natural expression.
  • On-the-fly creation of alternate translations, by substituting a list of translated technical terms. Don’t like “illumination” for jhāna? Fine, roll your own.
  • Detailed semantic markup of the Pali text can be applied automatically to other texts; for example, we could distinguish between narrative and teachings, things spoken by different people, and so on. This can be then used to enhance search and other natural language processing.
  • Annotations can be added to the text (via an interface on SC), which can function like footnotes in books, except richer and more flexible. They could include text, audio, images, and so on. These can appear, if desired, in the appropriate place in any of the text or translations. So If I add a note to an English translation, someone reading the same sutta in Italian, for example, can read the note.

And so on. We are creating a native digital text, one which is not a second-rate copy of a book, but which is designed to take advantage of the possibilities that the digital medium offers, now and in the future.

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Thanks for the explanation, Bhante. Clearly a tool like that will increase speed and consistency and be brilliant for analysis.

It’s interesting how LaTeX has found a place outside of scientific writing. Clearly it’s the weapon of choice in physics and mathematics, but I didn’t imagine finding Pali geeks using it… :smile:

Dear Achan,
Why don’t you do this on the Internet itself.
Discourse can be used to discuss issues and Github can be used to merge and host the work in progress.
I think it will reduce the time needed by a large amount and allow a lot of people to earn good merit by contributing even in a very small way they can.

I have fond memories of the Global Congress on bhikkhunis that we held at Hamburg in 2007. One evening, a group of Buddhist scholars, myself included, gathered to draft a short statement of support for bhikkhuni ordination. Present were most of the well-known academics in the field: I think I was the only one without a Phd. It took us maybe two or three hours to draft a few sentences. Which weren’t, in the end, all that good. Welcome to the wonderful world of writing by committee!

Before I came up with this plan, I have mulled over many different options of how to achieve the goal of having a full, accurate, free translation of the Suttas. One by one I dismissed them, before ending up with what I am planning for now.

There have been at least two projects that aimed to do pretty much what you suggest. One is Wikipitaka, the other Wipitaka. As you can see, after maybe ten years, Wikipitaka has a reasonably large number of suttas. But they are, on the whole, of poor quality, and many of them are cut and pasted from existing translations, and hence violate copyright claims. Wipitaka has got basically zero traction and has accomplished almost nothing.

There are reasons why these projects haven’t worked as well as they should have, and perhaps we could learn from them and do better next time. But I’m not convinced. I simply don’t think there are that many accomplished Pali scholars in the world, at least not that many that can speak fluent English.

I’ve known Pali for 20 years, and I’ve been working in the field, in conversation and community with other experts, for all that time, not only doing scholarly work, but also teaching in the real world, learning how to express these ideas to people who are not experts. I really don’t feel like debating every point of interpretation because someone on the internet thinks they know what the real meaning of saṅkhāra is.

Right now I’m at a point in my life where I have a clear idea, not only what the texts are saying, but how I want to express that. It’s taken me all this time to get here. It’s not a burden, it’s a vocation: it’s what I long to do. So, that’s what I’ll do. It will be done, I think certainly quicker, and I hope, better, than any team effort could do, at least any practically achievable team at this time.

Having said which, once the basic translation is there, the platform will be available, and if anyone wants to do another translation in this way, whether into English or another language, they are most welcome. There will be difficulties, like maintaining stylistic unity, but there are ways of overcoming these, if enough work is put into it.

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This project is very exciting. It opens up the possibility of a comprehensive online ontology of the Buddha’s teaching, using a tool like Protégé and implemented in an ontology language such as OWL or RDF. This base would enable automated, natural-language queries. In other words, there could be a Buddhist digital assistant app where people could, in a very real sense, ask the Suttas questions. This is something that has been possible technically for some time, but a well-organized and consistent translation base has not been available.

Indeed! Thanks for the link. This is something we’ve been thinking about for some time. When the new translation is happening, we’ll have a look at what is possible, and Protege will definitely be on the list.

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Ontology is very powerful. Please keep me in mind for this project team. I have advanced skills in ontology development and have been thinking along these lines since 2003 or so.

Go for it, Bhante! :smile: The breakthrough hacks are always pioneered by a solo visionary. All the best to you in this endeavor. It’s something we have needed for a long time, and it will provide a base for much further development.

While you’re translating I will develop the root ontology for all the basic concepts, then we can reconcile the terminology and go on from there.

Well, that would be excellent. It seems to me there is so much unrealized potential in this area. The thing with SC, once we have it going, we can roll out the service to any language, doing the NLP on the English, but matching exactly the translated texts.

I have a friend who also has skills in this area; he was formerly working with Watson, now with Health in NSW. If you want to get in touch, send me an email at “myname” at “email service of well-known search company”.com.

Also if you like, ask @blake for access to our Github, you can play directly with the code.

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I’ve seen the potential for some time. But the lack of a regularized translation, with accessible lexicon and uniform code base, was a hindrance. I’m more of a content guy than a coder these days. By the time I caught up with the standards they would be obsolete. Fortunately the Dhamma never needs bug fixes or an upgrade. :relaxed:

I would love to contact your friend; thanks, I will be in touch.

I wish you all the luck I can offer you Bhante :smile: . I’m no expert in this area but I kind of thought that it would make the process much faster if you could put up a well organized team process in place with the knowledge that you have in this area (I know team work can be counter productive if you don’t get the process and the work breakdown right). I’m not saying that everyone is going to get on with the translation but there are other work that these lay people can do such as writing PO files. Compiling them to HTML, Making graphics to explain difficult concepts, Making videos to explain difficult words, etc. You can lead the way and let the others follow (may be you can make a set of guidelines for them to follow). What you can do is keeping the authority to make decisions on translations to yourself (may be a committee) and let these lay people work on other details. There have been other projects done like this. Take Linux for example. In Linux most of the decisions are made by Linus Torvalds, others are just following. With the Metta you have I think you can get the followers to do what you want them to do very easily, I guess. The other great thing about open source is that it is a tried and tested process with all the tools freely available. You might need to buy some hosting space though, That’s about all you have to spend. I think it would be so compassionate of you if you let these lay people get some good merit by helping you with your good karma.
With Mega Metta.
Charith.