kalden yungdrung wrote:
[color=#0080FF]Jean-Luc Achard is a native french speaking person and his English is praised by prof. Henk Blezer of university Leiden (NL). It is a pitty that he is not here present aboard.
I welcome JLA's presence. I respect him a lot. I don't know Hank Blezer, but I am rather unimpressed by a lot of his writing, specifically on Tibetan medicine (something about which I definitely know more since I am a trained sman pa). Also Henk Blezer is not a native English speaker.
Indeed the translations in English out of Tibetan from Jean-Luc Achard do belong to the best Tibetan translations.
JLA has some funny translation equivalents that I think are odd, but in general he understands the meaning of Dzogchen texts.
So it is not true that you as a native English speaking person, together of course linked to your education, would be better in English translations than a Frenchman like Jean Luc Achard from the Sorbonne / Paris. You would probably have a better accent then JLA, i guess.
Anyone tranlslating into their own native language will do better than someone who is not.
But nevertheless, i would point out the necessity for a standard, for Dzogchen terms. This because we deal here with exact the same experiences......
That is not going to happen anytime soon. Dzogchen Community uses its jargon following ChNN and Adriano Clemente; Padma Publishing has their jargon; Rangjung Yeshe has its jargon; Tony Duff has his (awkward) jargon; Dharmacakra Translation committee has its; You Bonpos have yours following John Reynolds primarily as far as I can see, etc.
One can never add or substract things related to Dzogchen, that is clear.So i guess it is due to the English language shortcomings, that we explain the same things with different words, or we make a mistake with the right following order of Dzogchen experiences.
There is no shortcoming in the English language. Actually, English, being the European language with the highest number of synonyms, the most heterogenous language in Europe, is the most ideal for translations, especially translations of a technical nature because it is rigid about word order in way that Romance and Tuetonic languages are not.
Further, even within Dzogchen literature, the same things are explained with different terminology. The personal experience of Dzogchen is vastly more important than the words.
It shows that Dzogchen can be approached on different ways explained by different Dzogchen Masters.
What I observe is that for the most part the language this or that master uses depends on who they get as a translator and when. These days, non of Reynolds conventions are in vogue in Dzogchen Community.
A lot of ChNN's translations of terms depend in the fact that he started teaching Dzogchen in Italian first, and then merely translated his Italian translations into English, for example, lhun grup in Italian is autoperfectione or self-perfection in English.
N