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With the existing Chinese texts, they take you to an external site (CBETA). You can get back to SuttaCentral by using the "back" button on your browser. Alternatively, you can open the Chinese text in a new tab (usually with a middle click).
We are at work to implement the Chinese texts on SuttaCentral itself. This will, hopefully, not be too long coming.
We have a number of Bhante Anandajoti's translations here; he's a friend of SuttaCentral, and an excellent scholar, and I have tried to get all of his translations that are relevant. But we haven't included his translations from MN, SN, or AN, for the simple reason that we are still hoping to host the complete translations by Bhikkhu Bodhi. He is very supportive of this, but we have been unable to persuade the publishers, so far at least.
Anandajoti's word by word translations wouldn't work on SuttaCentral, as we only have whole texts. But if we are missing any of his translations, please let us know.
As for having all available translations, we have quite a range, but not all. I know that many people like having various translations available. But in my opinion in almost all cases one or other of the translations is clearly superior. Regardless of one's personal preferences as to style and so on, there's just a basic question of understanding and accurately representing the underlying text. There are a few exceptions to this, notably in the few cases where a specially popular text like the Dhammapada or the Satipatthana Sutta has been ably translated by several hands. I would like to aim to have one good translation of every text hosted on SuttaCentral, and ideally, consistent translations of entire collections, rather than individual suttas.
Currently I'm in Sri Lanka, and having discussions and doing research towards hosting Sinhala translations of the Pali canon, and possibly one or two other texts as well.
We'd love to do something like this, but it's not in our immediate plans. I think that it is a shame that we don't have accessible, accurate translations of all the early Buddhist texts available in every language, free from the encumbrance of copyright. But it is not a small task!
While travelling in Europe I am taking the chance to learn what I can about the various translations that are available, so that we can incorporate the best in to SuttaCentral. We have just added Burmese translations for the Digha and Majjhima, and hope to expand this soon. Once we have a good coverage of available translations, we can start to think about possible ways of developing further.
Thanks for the suggestion! But we have to restrict our scope somewhere, so at the moment we plan to expand to include the Vinaya and Abhidhamma, including the remainder of the Khuddka Nikaya, but not the commentaries. It all just gets too much! Also, the commentarial literature is mostly restricted to one tradition, so there's not much benefit to be gained from SuttaCentral's special focus on the parallels. Nevertheless, it certainly is convenient to be able to swiftly look up the commentary for a passage, so perhaps some time in the future we might look at that.
We have been actively seeking translations of the Pali texts in Sinhala, Burmese, and Thai, as you suggest. In fact today I was having some discussions about the Burmese translations. It will take some time to bring all these on board, but hopefully you will see these on SuttaCentral next year.
Hi Makaonte,
Thank you so much for thinking of us!
At the moment we don't have any formal facilities for making donations, mainly because our costs are very low and we run almost entirely by volunteer contributions. However, we do have some costs, which at this time are mainly to do with work that we have outsourced to an Indian IT firm. They are preparing a number of texts that have so far never been properly digitized, including the English translation of the Pali Vinaya. This is slow and labor intensive work, and I have been very impressed by what our Indian colleagues have achieved.
So our donations have been handled informally by some of my supporters in Sydney. If you would like to make a contribution, please send me an email and i will put you i touch with them. (And this also applies for anyone else reading this who would like to make a donation). My email address is [myname] [at] gmail [dot] com.
That he most certainly is. A true gentleman, and an excellent scholar.
Hi Ven,
Thanks for this suggestion, I will pass this on to Rod Bucknell, who is our "master of parallels."
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Yes, our coverage of the Iti, and the Khuddaka in general, is quite spotty. We are working on getting a full Pali text, including all Khuddaka texts, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma, and after that we will focus more on filling out the translations. Hopefully we will be able to see the new additions after this weekend!