This post by Brad Warner has some interesting comments about translation. (The topic of the post is Buddhist modernism, but I want to skip over that for now until I've had a chance to read the book he cites.)
Translation of scripture is an issue for most religions. Especially when the scriptures are millennia old and come from cultures and languages far removed from ours, precise translation often is impossible. In the case of Buddhism, choices made by the early English language translators have left a mark on how much of the West understands Buddhism today. I wrote recently about the use of the word "enlightenment," for example.
Another example: Some of the early translators of the Pali texts interpreted upekkha as "detachment," while more recent translations use� "equanimity." That's a pretty huge difference.
Why did the early translators use "detachment"? Because the word upekkha has a connotation of viewing something from a high place. To the early, mostly British, translators, this suggested "rising above" a situation. But Pali speakers understood the word as seeing the "big picture"; taking in the whole view; not being partisan or one-sided.
Sensei Warner's blog post has a quote by philosophy professor and translator Jay Garfield --
"When we translate, we transform in all of the following ways: we replace terms and phrases with particular sets of resonances in their source language with terms and phrases with very different resonances in the target language; we disambiguate ambiguous terms, and introduce new ambiguities; we interpret, or fix particular interpretations of texts in virtue of the use of theoretically loaded expressions in our target language; we take a text that is to some extent esoteric and render it exoteric simply by freeing the target language reader to approach the text without a teacher; we shift the context in which a text is read and used."
As an example of shifting context, Warner cites moksha, a word heard more in Hinduism than in Buddhism. It is usually translated as "freedom." But to a Hindu, it means "liberation from samsara." Westerners often pick up the word freedom, rip it out of context, and run off with it in entirely different directions.
That said, I have some issues with the rest of Warner's post. His teacher, Nishijima Roshi, has a new translation of the "Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way" by Nagarjuna coming out. Nishijima Roshi has chosen to translate shunyata as "balanced state" instead of the standard word, "emptiness."
Now, there's no question "emptiness" is easily misunderstood. I appreciate that "emptiness" doesn't quite convey what Nagarjuna intended. But can any language convey what Nagarjuna intended?
And I think "balanced state" is worse. Consider this line from the Heart Sutra --
Form is no other than emptiness; emptiness no other than form.
Now consider,
Form is no other than a balanced state; a balanced state is no other than form.
It's not working for me.
Perhaps in the context of the "Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way" it works, or at least makes more immediate sense. But "making sense" may not always be ideal. It is, as Garfield wrote, taking a text that is somewhat esoteric and rendering it exoteric, "simply by freeing the target language reader to approach the text without a teacher."
Put another way, "emptiness" does challenge many of us to ask, "what the bleep does that mean?" If you think you understand it at first reading, you aren't likely to dig deeper.
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