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Welcome
to “From the Academy,” a new newsletter inspired by a previous Tricycle
column by the same name. This monthly email series, exclusive to
Premium subscribers, introduces a topic of interest in the world of
Buddhism from an academic perspective, and offers books or articles for
further reading. This month’s newsletter grew out of a recent
conversation in the Tricycle editorial office about translation and our
use of diacritics.
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Diacritics and Translation
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What are diacritics?
A diacritic is a sign written above or below a letter indicating pronunciation. The diacritical dots, lines, and squiggles have many names—such as diaeresis ï, macron ā, and tilde ñ —but they may be unfamiliar to some Tricycle readers because English usually leaves them out when borrowing foreign words. We do not stay in hôtels, and even terms like naïve, passé, and résumé are often stripped of their marks.
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A dharani written in two languages – Sanskrit and central Asian Sogdian
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To use or not to use?
When
linguists convert languages such as Chinese, Sanskrit, and Pali into
the Latin alphabet, they use diacritics to represent the sounds and
spellings accurately. Thus, the diacritics of the Buddhist terms Ch’an, ḍākinī, or mettā
indicate how to pronounce these words. Diacritics are especially useful
when learning a foreign language and are used in academic writing for
accuracy. Not using diacritics can create confusion with words that look
similar without them.
Diacritics are less important when a commonly used foreign word appears
in an English text. Sanskrit terms incorporated into the English
dictionary—such as nirvāṇa, saṃsāra, śūnyatā—lose their diacritics, allowing them to become more easily integrated into general use. Tricycle typically does not employ diacritics for Buddhist terms, but we retain them in proper names or in our long-running What’s In A Word series. Tricycle
addresses a popular audience, and for most readers, the primary
consideration is recognizing and becoming familiar with key Buddhist
terms. Further, nonspecialist readers are not likely to know how a
diacritic modifies the sound of a word. Still, even among the editors,
opinions vary.
Diacritics and translation
For
translators and writers presenting Buddhist teachings in English,
conversations about diacritics are part of a more extensive discussion
about the movement of ideas across cultures. Translation and diacritics
require a sensitivity to context: who is reading a text, where, and for
what purpose. The translator Damion Searls suggests, for example, that
using the Lakota name Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, or his Anglicized name,
Sitting Bull, depends on the audience. Diacritics provide a visual
reminder that words and names have meaning and history in another
language and culture and alert us to pay particular attention so that
nothing is lost in translation.
Where the rubber meets the road
Teachers
and translators must decide whether to tailor Buddhist ideas to their
time and place or challenge an audience to engage with the complexity of
foreign concepts from the distant past. For example, mindfulness (coined in the late 19th century by the scholar William Rhys Davids) has long been used to translate the Pali sati and the Sanskrit smṛti; however, these terms have a significant range of meanings. The word mindfulness
simplifies things for an English speaker and, for better or worse,
allows for new meanings. The power of language to shape Buddhist
teachings cannot be overestimated, and we take this seriously at Tricycle.
The future of translation
In an upcoming Tricycle
article, Donald S. Lopez Jr. discusses how the history of Buddhism is,
in many ways, a history of translation. Both of these histories are on
the cusp of significant changes with developments in artificial
intelligence. AI might not be quite ready
to translate Buddhist texts, but many scholars believe that as
technology improves, so will its capacity to produce translations. How
machines will handle the various choices surrounding diacritics remains
to be seen.
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