Alison Melnick 2007
While doing this project for Renaissance class, some interesting questions about Tibetan to English translation and how we categorize words came up. I marked up the two versions of the chapter (English and Tibetan) side-by-side. When I began the English version I had done very little marking up of texts. By the time I returned to the project, I had been marking up many articles for JIATS in English with some Wylie.
One issue that came up was that of Tibetan names. The Blue Annals frequently includes exhaustive lists of lineage members, and many of these people’s names include their place of origin. For example, in the Chapter I marked up, I came across khams chen rgan lhas pa, Pomdrakpa Karma Pakshi, Phagm o of Bhangala, and so forth. It is debatable whether these place names should be marked as part of the person’s name, or separately marked as a place name. The issue of identity is central here, and there are many individuals in the book who adopt the name of their place of origin into their name. Thus, the name of one’s home region becomes a simultaneous title and mark of self-identification. Perhaps it also gives legitimacy to the person and the place…??
It seems that there are many spelling mistakes going from Tibetan into Wylie and phoneticized English- I am not sure as to whether the original error occurred when the text was being typed into the word documents in Tibetan, or when it was going from that to the English… or whether each case is different. For example, there is a reference to a practitioner named either nyid phug pa or nying phug pa in Chapter 14. While the Tibetan had nyid phug pa, the Wylie and English phoneticizations in the English word document had nying phug pa and Nyingpugpa. I changed the English to match with the Tibetan, with the assumption that the Tibetan is going to be closer to the original and whoever was doing the phoneticization (Roerich, or someone since then--? Not sure how these versions came to me)- mistook a da for a nga.
This seems to be a frequently occurring problem, at least in Chapter 14. Soon after the typo mentioned above, I came across a mis-spelling in the English version of shing po khyi. Although it is spelled correctly in the Tibetan document, the English had ’sing po khyi and the transliteration Singpokyi. Also Purang (spu hrang) was mispelled. I fixed the spelling in these as well. It seems that about 1 in 5 of the Wylie transliterations do not match up with the Tibetan in the document that I have…
I definitely can’t be sure that I caught all spelling mistakes, since my Tibetan spelling abilities are nowhere near adequate at this point.