Tibetannet

Recently, a quadrilingual dictionary was published by Tibet University, filling in the gap in world Tibetology and Buddhist studies, Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Tibetan-Sanskrit-English-Chinese dictionary complied by Professor Puchung Tsering is a key project of the Social Sciences Research Base of the Ministry of Education’s Humanities.

The "Collective works of Translated terms" is a part of the "Tripitaka", or Buddhist Canon, originally in Sanskrit-Tibetan was complied in the 8th Century.

Taken from the "Tripitaka" are mainly Buddhist terms, including a philosophy terminology glossary. On top of this, other related names of Indian Buddhist origins have been included such as the names of mountains, rivers, flowers and other natural objects, as well as ancient Indian philosophers.

Puching Tsering was graduated from School of Oriental Languages the University in Oslo, capital of Norway. According to Puching Tsering, "Collective works of translated term" of the quadrilingual dictionary follows the sequence of entries and classification of sections in "Tripitaka".

In addition to the accurate translation into four different languages, the dictionary focuses on the transliteration of the terms into Latin and Sanskrit writing, making it the world’s first collective works of translated terms in four languages as well as international standard Latin transliterations.

Various versions of the translated terms in "Tripitaka" dated back to the early 19th century by the Hungarian Tibetology scholar Alexander Csoma de Koros. Working from Tibetan, the first part of a trilingual dictionary in Sankcrit, Tibetan and English was published in 1910.However, since the author changed the original sequence and classification of the original version, quite a part of the entries were missing, and there were many spelling errors especially in the Tibetan section, this has not become a reliable version yet.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, both the Soviet Union and Japan had their own versions of translations from Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese texts. At the end of the 20th Century, Indian and Chinese scholars collated these various "Translated Names" for translation study, but because of the limitations of various languages, these versions still have shortcomings.

In 2012, Puchung Tsering began to work on compiling and translating the "Translated terms". He collected five versions of the "Tripitaka" from Nathang, Beijing, Dege, Zhuoni, and Lainai, and used the copy from Dege – which was the most complete – as a reference point to compile and translation by comparing them all. After three years of hard work, the dictionary has now been published.

Puchung Tsering said that at present in the world of Buddhist academic research, many terms lack a corresponding translation from the original Sanskrit. Thus, many scholars have published academic papers using terms – in particular the names of people, places or Buddhist terms – taken directly from Sanskrit without any corresponding English translation or Latin transliteration, making it difficult for readers to understand if they don’t know the meaning. "Communication is very important, so this is an international general reference book for translators", he said.

"One of the purposes of writing this dictionary was to help the younger generation of Tibetan scholars to grasp more Sanskrit terms in order to be able to conform with the international standard", Puchung Tsering said.

In addition to the original Sanskrit retrieval directory, the dictionary also now features a Tibetan alphabetical search directory, making the dictionary more convenient to use. The next step is to continue to sort out the English and Chinese search directories to benefit more diverse language users.