About the Academy a monthly email newsletter for premium subscribers, developed in collaboration with Tricycle’s resident Ho Family Foundation General scholar of Buddhism. Each issue provides scholarly insight into a key theme in Buddhist thought and practice, with additional reading and videos for further exploration. Some of the numbers are published here for a wider audience Tricycle community.
Anyone who reads about Buddhism sooner or later comes across words that contain a lot of signs: diacritics, signs written above or below the letter indicating pronunciation. Diacritical points, lines and curves have many names-such as diaeresis Imacro theand tilde n – but may be unfamiliar to some Tricycle readers because English usually omits them when borrowing foreign words. We don’t stay in hotels, even with expressions like naive, old fashionedand CV often deprived of their signs.
To use or not to use
When linguists convert languages such as Chinese, Sanskrit, and Pali to the Latin alphabet, they use diacritics to accurately represent sounds and spellings. Thus the diacritics of Buddhist terms Ch’an, ḍākinīor mettā show me how to pronounce these words. Diacritical marks are particularly useful when learning a foreign language and are used in academic writing for accuracy. Using diacritics can cause confusion with similar words without them.
Diacritics are less important when a commonly used foreign word appears in an English text. Sanskrit terms included in the English dictionary – such as nirvana, saṃsāra, śūnyatā– lose their diacritical characters, making them easier to integrate into general usage. Tricycle typically does not use diacritics in Buddhist terms, but we retain them in some proper nouns, for a long time What’s in a word series, or the occasional article with a more academic bent than this one. Tricycle it appeals to a popular audience, and the primary concern for most readers is recognition and familiarity with key Buddhist terms. When we use them, most readers probably don’t know how diacritics change pronunciation. That said, even among editors, opinions are divided as to whether or not to use it.
Diacritics and translation
For translators and writers of Buddhist teachings in English, discussions of diacritics are part of a larger discussion of the movement of ideas across cultures. Translation and diacritics require context sensitivity: who reads a text, where and for what purpose. Translator Damion Searls suggests, for example, that the use of the Lakota name Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotak or its anglicized name, Sitting Bull, depends on the audience. Diacritics are a visual reminder that words and names have meaning and history in another language and culture, and are a warning to pay special attention so that nothing is lost in translation.
Where the rubber meets the road
Teachers and translators must decide whether to adapt Buddhist thought to their own time and place, or to challenge their audience to engage with the complexities of alien concepts from the distant past. For example, vigilance (created by scholar William Rhys Davids in the late 19th century) has long been used to translate Pali. sati and Sanskrit smṛti; however, these terms have significant meaning. The word vigilance it simplifies things for an English speaker and allows for new meanings, for better or for worse. The power of language in shaping Buddhist teachings cannot be overestimated, and we take this seriously Tricycle.
The future of translation
In a past Tricycle articleDonald S. Lopez Jr. discusses how the history of Buddhism is in many ways a history of translation. Both are on the verge of significant change with the development of artificial intelligence. The AI may not be ready yet to perfectly translate Buddhist texts with nuances, but many scholars believe that as technology advances, its ability to produce translations will also improve. How machines handle the various choices surrounding diacritical characters remains to be seen.
Additional resources
- Jan Nattier,The Prehistory of Buddhist Translation: From Gandhārī and Pāli to Han Dynasty Chinese”, video lecture, 2017. Nattier traces the earliest centuries of Buddhist translation and addresses the special challenges of translating Buddhist texts into English.
- Damion Searls, The philosophy of translationYale University Press, 2024. The philosopher Searls offers an account of translation and examines what it means to carry meaning in languages.
- Bhikkhu Bodhi in conversation with Matthew Abrahams:In Defense of Enlightenment,'” Tricycle Summer 2021. The eminent translator and monk Bhikkhu Bodhi argues that “enlightenment” rather than “awakening” better captures the meaning of the word bodhiand that the shift in usage has obscured something essential.
