Hi Piya,
You make a very legitimate point, and I believe
there are some words that can be adopted in english
buddhist translations, much like how the Buddha
adopted brahmanical terms and redefined them in more
useful way.
On the other hand, so many perfectly good words are
so corrupted by Christianity and carry such negative
connotations that from a marketing standpoint, it's
just not helpful to promote buddhism if we have to
fight strongly ingrained notions. For example, when I
was reading some (PTS?) translations of pali suttas
many years ago, their use of "Lord" (the Buddha),
"thy", "thou", and other archaic terms made the pali
suttas sound like bible passsages. So much so, I
couldn't even finish reading the sutta, it filled me
with so much revulsion and disgust. Humans, including
myself, are fickle and even small matters such as this
should be considered when our aim is to promote
buddhism. And I wasn't even subjected to monotheistic
indoctrination like many of my fellow westerners were.
I can only imagine how traumatic and understandably
sensitive they are to certain loaded words (such as
'faith').
As with most things in life, no clear cut answer on
this one. I think we have to proceed on a case by case
basis.
No matter which word we choose, "faith",
"confidence", "trust", I think the important thing is
to qualify and define it clearly once, and then any
future references within that text would refer to that
specific definition, just as in a discourse Buddha
would define "brahmin" once, and then afterwards it
was understood to refer to his re-definition rather
than the common definition.

-fk
p.s. I vote for "confidence" :-)

--- Piya Tan <libris@...> wrote:

> Correction:
>
> I think we should outgrow Christian influences
> before they become the standard behind
> our attempts at translating Buddhist texts.
>
> The Buddha himself used many Brahmanical terms and
> in that way communicated with the
> masses.
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com