kalden yungdrung wrote:
Again see above i doubt that realy. If above mentioned persons were not academics of such a high degree then i would agree.
In general, I am very underwhelmed by academic scholars, especially European ones. I find European Academia very rigid and prejudiced. It is very hard in European Acedemia to be taken seriously if you are a practitioner.
Bonpos have so their translators and they are many. Most of them have a western title Phd / prof. so it is not only John who does the job.
"PhD" does not mean very much to me. It is just a title for getting a job. I have meant many PhD's in Buddhist studies from Harvard and so on who are not very learned about Buddhism in general. They are learned in writing papers, much of which is filled with crap.
English would be a combination of French and German when i understood that well.
In German one can express oneself also very exact.
Yes, German is a very precise language, and in some respects is better for translating Tibetan texts than English because both languages are agglutinative. Also German can reproduce the subject-object-verb structure of Tibetan quite well, whereas English cannot.
Nevertheless, since English is forged out Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin and Greek, and easily absorbs terms from other languages such as nirvana, samsara, etc. In my opinion, since English is now the international language of advanced scholarship, this proves that English is the best language to translation Dharma texts into, all thanks to the British Empire, Brittania Rule the Waves.