THDL Toolbox > Tibetan Texts > Cataloging a Tibetan Text > Reference Lists For Cataloging > Section Names > More Issues Related to Translator's Colophon
More Issues Related to Translator's Colophon
Contributor(s): Phil Stanley
There is also uncertainty about who wrote the translator/reviser colophons. It is probably more likely that the translator/reviser colophons were written by the people themselves, but there is significantly more variation in Kangyur and Tengyur translator/reviser colophons than in author colophons. (I count something like 70 cases of variation in author attributions in the Kangyurs and Tengyurs whereas there are some 500 cases for variations in translator/reviser attributions.) This may indicate that there has been widespread tinkering with the translator attributions by later compilers, even if the translator/reviser(s) had written the original colophons. It is possible that such variations in translator/reviser colophons stem from several versions of a text being in circulation that came from different stages in the revising/retranslation process of a text, with subsequent compilers faced with variant copies of a text possibly combining variant colophon info to create yet another colophon for a text. There are also known cases of gsar ma "translators" replacing the names of the original translators with their own name, perhaps changing the title some as well, and then pretending the old translation was there new work. So it is unclear what hands have been involved in writing such colophons
