A Report On The Translation Of "Dhammapada Stories"

This thesis is a report on the translation of "Dhammapada Stories". Dhammapada isan important scripture of Buddhism, which is a collection of words of the BuddhaHimself (Mahathera2000). Dhammapada Stories is a collection of stories behind thosewords. Buddhism is a profound philosophy with a great deal of obscure concepts. Thetranslator in the hope of conveying the philosophy rather than the language of thestories tried his best to translate obscure concepts with simple words. To do that, thetranslator resorts to closely-related references. In case of difficulties of understandingthe text, the translator tried to broaden the context by comparing Buddhist scripturesin ancient Chinese and the author’s other books with the source text. In this sense thetranslator inclined to use free translation as the main strategy.Buddhism is more enlightening than informing. This book “DhammapadaStories” is no exception. To preserve this characteristic, a deep grasp, as far as thestories go, of Buddhism doctrine is prerequisite, which is an enormous task for thetranslator. However Dhammapada and its Commentaries cover most of the ideasthose stories try to convey, the translator can just focus on them without digging deepinto the enormous system of Buddhism. The translator also took advantage of theready availability of Buddhist dictionaries.The last part sums up shortages and problems of the translation. First, using thestrategy of free translation inevitably leads to inaccurate convey of the original ideas.Second, there are still obscure concepts in the translation which the translator isunable to substitute for simple words.