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Under review

Sanzang Translation Machine & Cooperation

Nuno Castro (Unrul3r) 10 years ago updated by Sujato Bhikkhu 10 years ago 3
A while ago, I found a website which has some translated discourses from the Taishō Tripiṭaka, it also has a translation machine called Sanzang and an online translation tool built from it which is useful and seems promising. Since the staff here is intending to implement the Chinese Āgama literature onto SuttaCentral, I thought it might be useful if I shared this here for a possible cooperation with the site's maintainer. Maybe it might be possible to help English-only readers by integrating a dictionary similar to the Pāḷi one. If this specific idea is not possible due to some kind of constraint, maybe some other kind of cooperation might, nevertheless, be possible. Contact with the website's maintainer is possible through the e-mail provided in the About page.

I hope this might be useful and could bear some kind of fruit.

Kind Regards,
Nuno
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Under review
Hi Nuno,

Thanks for this. We're aware of this project; in fact it's maintained by the blogger/commenter known as LLT, who you might recognize from here or my blog. It's definitely an interesting approach, and we have discussed possible ways of integrating with SC.

We already have our own Chinese lookup tool, although just checking the site now I see that's it's not working, so we'll have to fix that. But it works pretty much like the Pali lookup; in some ways it's a lot easier with Chinese, as there's no morphology to worry about. Our lookup is based on the excellent Buddhist Chinese Dictionary maintained by Charles Muller, which he has kindly made available for us.

Like the Pali dictionary, simple definitions are available on hover, and the full entry is accessed by clicking the headword. It pretty much means that you can read the Chinese texts straight off, if you have a reasonable knowledge of Buddhist texts; and of course it would ideally be used together with translations.
I see. Thank you for the update. Good to know!

SC is turning out to be the most useful website to study the Buddha's teaching. Thank you for the effort.

Kind regards.
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well, thank you, that's very kind.