Tuesday 31 August 2010

Re-Enrolment

I must remember to re-enrol with KCL tomorrow!


Chapter 30

More than half-way through this, the final chapter. Again there is something of a translation style change. A number of sections are quite minimal and rely heavily upon narrative to clarify meanings. Also there have been a couple of phrases whose wording is relatively unique given the overall lexis of the text. In fact I would have thought that Karashima would have picked these up an added them into his glossary. The first is the occurrence of 薩和薩 which is usually a transliteration if the skt. sarvasattva, 'all beings'. In the text this doesn't make sense and the only possible meaning could be 'bodhisattva and bodhisattva'. The context being the writing down of the prajnaparamita sutra. It is an absurdity that all beings would do such a thing. Next to cause me to pause and think was 諦. This usually translated as 'truth' as in the Four Noble Truths (四諦). But no, we have 諦念 and  諦受. Here 諦 has the rarer literary meaning of 'something to think about', which is really what is implied in 四諦. In practice, this 諦 is not pondering, but taking care over something. Also 念 is not simply to think, but to recall.

Whilst Karashima's T224 glosses have no reference to 諦, his glosses on Dharamaraksha's Lotus Sutra did have 諦觀 and 諦聽: 'to observe minutely' and 'listen carefully'.

After modifying my text I sent a comment to the DDBT for the 諦 entry to add an additional meaning.

With some luck and peace and quiet I should have Chapt.30 finished by this time tomorrow night.

Sunday 29 August 2010

Chapter 27 -DONE!

Well, started at 9am this morning and apart from lunch and a two hour walk with my family and evening tea, I've pushed on with reviewing and ironing out issues in my rendering of Chapt.27! Unlike the previous few chapters, this one varies greatly in content as compared to the extant Sanskrit and the Conze English rendering. My general observation is that the key narrative elements are pretty well the same, the differences lie in the expansion and elaboration of descriptions and attributes.

There were a couple of phrases which I needed to ponder over, indeed, I pondered over them so much that I can't remember what they are now! I'm pretty well-brain numbed. Its almost 11pm and I need to call it a day.

Chapt 28/29 I remember working on last autumn and so I expect most of this to be fine with the exception of a few minor corrections. I know that there will be some issues with the final chapter but, fortunately this is something of an epilogue and is quite brief (5 pages).

Friday 27 August 2010

Chapter 26 -DONE!

Been quite successful today, revised a complete chapter. Mind, I did start a little after 9 am and its now 22:58pm! Its a hard slog. There were some interesting changes of context which weren't easy to pick-up before. Indeed, there was a couple of sentences of reported speech which I hadn't picked up before. So, Chapt.27 tomorrow. Following that the large Chaps on Sadhuprarudita and Dharmodgata should be relatively simple as I remember working on these chapters quite extensively. The final chapter will need some polishing.

Today I was looking at FineReader Pro Version 10. This will also handle Chinese OCR. That would be useful! Downloaded the trial version but it wouldn't install using wine nor would it far any better in my Windows XP laptop. Perhaps it needs a more recent service pack. I'll try it on my Windows 7 box tomorrow.


Thursday 26 August 2010

Hurray Done!

Finished Chapter 25. Not much care taken here by the original translators! I think that they were working to a tight deadline and within a restricted set of glosses.

Make extensive use of PDFStudio today, adding Taisho page references to the Conze text and improving the range of bookmarks in both the Conze & Karashima PDFs.

Well,  onto the next chapter!

Wednesday 25 August 2010

Still not done!

Spent most of my free time today working on this chapter and still haven't finished. I've only a page and a half to rework so lets hop for completion tomorrow. I feel behind somewhat due to checking out some new software -PDF Studio. Whilst I have Acrobat it doesn't work well under wine on my Linux box. I guess that I could use a virtual desktop running XP but no. PDF Studio only cost me US$60 and works well. Its a little slower than I expected but then I'm regularly loading 800+ page bitmap documents. What I really needed it for was highlighting and commenting. So, one of the tasks that I've worked on is adding more bookmarks to Karashima's glossary.

There's one slight deficiency with PDF Studio, it doesn't like UTF-8 input. Strange. I've emailed Qoppa, the developers of PDF Studio for their comments and feedback.

Lets see what happens!


Chapters 23, 24 reviewed, Chapter 25 almost done!

Wow, its almost been a month since my last post! Ok, for the better part of the first half of August we were on holiday in Egypt -lots of snorkelling around the Red Sea coral reefs. But, I have been busy since getting back home. Chapters 23/24 were pretty grim, in an extremely rough format. But, I've now taken a good look at these and feel that they are now in good shape. The English is not what one might call publication-prose but it is a good reflection of the Chinese text. Just as with Classical Chinese texts, there's little point reading works such as the Daoxing unless you already know what's written there. The use of language is spartan and there are so many instances where otherwise familiar words are used in a totally unique way.

Only a about five pages left in Chapter 25 which I should have finished by tomorrow evening or thursday by the latest.