Buddhist Translators Workbench (BTW)

FAIN: HD-51383-11

Mangalam Centers (Berkeley, CA 94704-1418)
Stefan Baums (Project Director: March 2011 to August 2013)

The creation of a prototype for a platform allowing group collaborative translation, with Abidharma source texts serving as the initial test collection.

This project will create an integrated suite of open-source tools for translators of Buddhist texts, the Buddhist Translators Workbench (BTW). BTW will gather data on source texts and translations across cultures and across time. It will support both real-time and offline collaboration on group translation projects by logging user threads and dialogs and creating “digital footnotes” that preserve and inspire new research. BTW will for the first time ground Buddhist translation work in a shared, easily accessible body of knowledge. At Level I the project will bring together scholars and IT experts to choose an initial set of 500-1,000 terms and design an alpha-level prototype, using selected Abhidharma texts as its initial resource. It will also address software-development needs, including creation of language agnostic searches, proximity searches, and computer recognition of word clusters (Tibetan) and individual words (Sanskrit).