Wanted đŸ•”ïžâ€â™€ : Translator for SC-Voice interface

Our visit was in 2004.

For sure they are!

Could you point to these suttas? The green dot system seems currently out of function, except for English, so it’s not easy to find suttas in a particular language.

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Huh, I know less about my native country than I thought :slight_smile:

Stupid question, what’s the green dot system?

Most of my favorites are translated, e.g. MN 20 and AN 3.65. I believe they were taken from here.

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On SC you can select a language

and normally the menu should show you green dots at every section that has translations into that language

But right now it seems not to work as it should. I just see that even for English—as selected here—not all translations are shown.

If it works it’s an ingenious system!

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Thank you, I didn’t know you could do that! It’s a really cool feature!

I only looked up Romanian stuff for some because I was considering translating them for my parents


Funny enough, Danish isn’t even on the list, so I assume 0 translations!
(Not that we’d need them, 99% of Danes speak perfect English)

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As Karl found,

Apparently the Buddhists in Denmark are mostly immigrants . A Danish Buddhist resource may be of value to them, a bridge between an old home and a new home.

If only one sutta were translated, that would be of value. But even if it is only the interface, I would consider it worthwhile doing.

I can only encourage you!

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To all translators for Voice

@Invo @Jarek @Gabriel_L @Robbie @Dhammanando @erlendne @scatterbrain

This is for those who like translating and would like to still do a bit more.

Voice has a Wiki section that explains to the user how it is working. The home page of any particular language Wiki is linked to the “i” icon on the Voice home page (so far this is the case for English and German).

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If you would like to translate this Wiki into your own language, there are the following pages:

On the ToC page you find two sections, “Using SuttaCentral Voice” and “Engineering and Development”. You only need to translate the pages in the “Using SuttaCentral Voice” section, not the “Engineering and Development” section, since at present it would be a prerequisite for anyone who wants to help with Voice engineering and development that they speak English.

In order to translate these pages you can

  • either use your GitHub account and ask for editing rights in the Voice Wiki
  • or just copy the pages into a local text editor or word processor and translate them there; we can then add them to the Wiki.

When you create a new Wiki page for your language, please note that the home page has to be named in the following way:

Home@Your-language

with no spaces, and a capital letter for your language name. Just like

Home@Deutsch

The other pages can be linked according to the English ones; or else we can do that for you.

Please only do this if you feel so inclined, and have fun with it! :heart_eyes: :sunflower:

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It would indeed be a great Danish learning resource for new Buddhist immigrants!

What’s the Sutta translation policy, by the way?

I would be curious to dabble at it, both in Romanian and Danish (the latter with my Danish boyfriend checking everything and rephrasing as needed, since I’m not a native).

But, I am not a monk(nun?), I don’t know Pali. I would be translating them based on English translations (though I try to read several of those, both by Ajahn Sujato, Bhikkhu Bodhi, and Thanissaro Bhikkhu, where available, to get more of the nuance)

Would it be acceptable for me to give it a try with a few of them, and post the result on a new Discourse thread?

(sorry I’m going a bit off-topic
)

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I visited the country in 1965. With French & Latin I could understand nothing, but my friend had additionally Spanish and Portuguese and could understand quite a bit. I hadn’t realised til then that Romanian is also a Romance language, despite the hint in the name!

PS sorry about being off topic and where I don’t belong.

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I continue to be amazed that people visited Romania at all, doubly so during the Communist period!

Can confirm. I learned French and Latin in school, and they were a pain, I still can’t understand either (maybe a bit of Latin). I easily picked up Spanish from TV, so I can mostly understand what someone’s saying

We’re a weird mix of Latin, Slavic and a bunch of weird words that we assume are Dacian


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Hi, I have just listened Ricardo read AN10.2 and AN3.65 and I really enjoyed it.

Pronunciations were overall very good. :slight_smile:

The only quirk was how it pronounces ĂȘxtase.

It is a legit Portuguese word but Ricardo got it wrong. The first syllable should be longer.

It also pronounced arahant weirdly. It should be ah-rah-hant instead of air-hant.

Is there a way @karl_lew can fix these ?

:anjal:

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These were Amazon Polly voices, right?
Just thought I’d mention the SSML phoneme tag, on the off-chance it’s helpful to the devs, could be used to make sure all “strange” words like arahant are pronounced properly:

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Hi Gabriel, generally there are possibilities for @karl_lew to make improvements to pronunciation, within certain boundaries. But since this is quite a bit of work (we have for example still a whole list of things to be addressed for Amy, the English voice, that are not yet done) we only fix pronunciation problems that are in supported texts, i.e. segmented texts.

If these words also occur in the segmented Portuguese translations that you are making we will put them on the list; but if they occur only in legacy texts we won’t.

Thanks for listening and giving feedback! Glad that you enjoy it!! :heart_eyes:

If you wish, and feel Ricardo is ready to go live we would make an interim release at this point and update the production server.

I am certainly not the guardian of any rules on SC, but what I understood is the following:

SC is always happy to add new translations. It would be preferred these translations follow the segmentation of the Pali text (or other root texts, if they are segmented). These would be fully supported translations, unlike what is called legacy translations.

The term “legacy” doesn’t say anything about the quality of the translation, but just describes this technical aspect. So for example Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translations are certainly of high quality, and they count as legacy translations on SC because they don’t follow the segmentation. This means they can not be matched with the Pali text line by line or side by side, and other things that are possible with segmented translations and not possible with others.

So if you are planning to make new translations it would certiainly be worthwhile to use the segmentation. This is what SC is developing Bilara for, a software that supports this kind of work. It is right now in a sort of experimental stage, and not yet available to a wider range of users (I myself, and several others, are also waiting for it to become available
 :hourglass_flowing_sand: ). But that would be the best way of proceeding.

For knowledge of Pali, it is of course good to have some understanding of that language. And in order to do so you don’t have to be a monastic. :smile:

I myself am not very proficient in Pali, and probably never will (I won’t live long enough any more to do both, become a Pali expert and engage in Sutta translation). And I opted for the second one, as this is what I really like to do. And I trust that Bhante Sujato has done an excellent work analyzing the subtleties of the Pali, which is also documented in his many essays on his translation work. So I base my work mostly on his English translations, and case by case also compare with other (English or German) translators, and have a look at the Pali.

To me it is important that the text is intelligible and nice to read in the target language, and that it is as accurate as possible.

These are my thoughts on translation.

(So this is a little bit an aside in this thread, but it is still related to translation, right? :grin:)

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Just a couple of questions


logFile: ‘Log file’,

Is ‘log’ here a noun or a verb?

releaseIsCurrent: ‘Current release is latest. No action taken’,

The current release of what?

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Yes, this is exactly the sort of questions I also had when doing the translation. As I was already working in the Voice administration section, I was familiar with some of the terms, but others I just didn’t know in which context they occur.

Just showing you the Voice administration section.

Overview:

This is our staging server, and you can see different tabs in the menu line.

Log files:

Here you can see the page with the log files. For each event that happens on the server, a log file is created and stored. This makes it possible to find out what has happened in case something goes wrong. You can also see the settings for “Rows per page” which are still found on other pages too.

Yes, “log” is a noun here. For German I kept the same word, since it is normal usage in technical contexts.

Releases:

When you want to update the server with a new release there are two steps to perform, first you restart the server, and then you make the actual update. In case you try to update and the developer hasn’t pushed anything new to the server, Voice will just tell you that there is nothing new available, and it won’t update anything, “Current release is latest. No action taken”.

Hope this helps!

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I’m not an admin so this post is my own opinion.

This is fine as far as I know. Just make sure that your process is clearly documented, ie: who you’re translating from, what resources you consulted, etc.

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Ei jo, danggescheen.

:grin:

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:laughing: :rofl:

Ma mÀnnt do schwÀtzt jemand SaarlÀndisch! :heart:

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Got It. Yes, ĂȘxtase will occur in in the translations @marco and I are doing. It would be great to have that in the listen

I will listen to a few more suttas and let you if there is anything else getting pronounced oddly.

Congrats for the work @karl_lew this is really cool.

:anjal:

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Can you give us a sutta ID (eg. dn20:3.5) where the word occurs? I mean right now in what is available on SC, so that Karl can work on it. One example is enough.

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