soapy3 wrote:mikenz66 wrote:
His style certainly polarizes. Perhaps there is something in his writing (and speaking) that makes more sense to a native speakers of certain American dialects, but is somewhat grating for others. His choice of words is certainly not easy for non-native speakers.
I'm a native English speaker. I have no trouble understanding his writings. I just don't like his style. I agree with your assessment of Bhikkhu Bodhi's style, but I actually find it a fraction less off-putting than TB's.
Yes, I wasn't referring to you specifically. Apart from style, local people I know who are not native speakers have difficulty with Ven T's writing, and, particularly, speaking, which is very fast and often hard for
me to follow. I listened to his talks for a while before I realised that one of the people he often referred to wasn't "John Lee", but "
Ajahn Lee"...
soapy3 wrote:
I like Sujato's goal of making the new English translations easier to translate into other languages.
My wish is that Sujato shares TB's passion for getting to the true literal meaning of the Pali, and that he finds a way to make his translations inspiring.
It depends on what you mean by "literal". I think every translator worth reading has a passion for getting the "true meaning", but I think if you want "literal" in the sense of word-for-word translation with extremely consistent translation terms you'll be disappointed. From the threads I've linked above, it seems Ven Sujato's intention is to get across the "actual" (not "literal") meaning in clear English. The "actual" meaning includes knowledge of Pali idioms, and how certain expressions are used in other suttas. Of course, this inevitably involves some judgement.
The argument seems to be that if you want literal you can look at the Pali and get a word-for-word translation. The translation project will have a much tighter linking between English and Pali, so that you'd be able to easily access the Pali for each English sentence:
This renders a "literal" translation somewhat superfluous.
Already, with the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta for example, you can go to the Pali
here, turn on the Pali->English lookup (with the controls on the left) and see how (almost) every word translates, and compare that with the English (of course Pali syntax is somewhat backwards from English, so it's a bit of a struggle...). Better linking will make finding a sentence in the middle of a long sutta absolutely trivial.
Mike