They are all transitional, first attempts to translate a difficult subject by a difficult writer into English. Longchenpa' prose style is considered very elegant in Tibetan, but in English it has been generally rendered very turgidly so far. His verse translates into English somewhat more elegantly, but without considerable intellectual contrivance on the part of the translator, his verse, like most Tibetan verse, winds up being rendered very prosaically.Anonymous X wrote:Malcolm, which Longchenpa translations float your boat?Malcolm wrote:Translators are works in progress.RikudouSennin wrote:Hmmm, so there are errors in the translations, bummer.
My copy of the Golden Garland seemed okay but then again I don't know the original language, so finding out about errors in the translation...glad my other order was refunded.
But as with all first attempts, there can be errors, sometimes important ones, like the calque for dharmadhātu, "basic space of phenomena;" or the use of "ineffability" for nonexistence (med pa), which was the result of a translator/editorial team imposing a top down interpretation on a text, rather than reading the text itself, and more importantly, the tradition as a whole. Sometimes inertia just sets in, where people just follow what people before them did out of lack of certainty, clear research, or laziness.
Some people want to translate everything into English, whereas I want to make some terms English, like dharmadhātu, dharmatā, etc. After all, no one translates the word "gaucamole" or "puttanesca" into English? They have become English words in their own right.