Translations from Pali to Thai

Dear all,

I'm in Thailand at the moment, doing research for my dissertation which is a diachronic study of translations from Pali to Thai.

Is there anybody who has been involved in discussions about how to translate Pali to Thai, for example avoiding too much of a "monastic style" (Th. samnuan wat)?

For those familiar with Burmese: In Thai there are also kind of markers in use, e.g. for rendering Pali cases etc. into Thai.  William Pruitt has shown this for Burmese in his "Etude linguistique de nissaya birmans".
One could maybe say that the use of these markers has become a little bit stereotype in Thai through the introduction of a new Pali study curriculum by the late Prince Patriarch Vajirananavarorasa about 100 years ago. He introduced written exams for Pali in Siam, wrote a Pali grammar and set up a new curriculum which is still in use by Thai "mainstream Pali" ("bali sanam luang").

From the viewpoint of Translation Studies it is quite interesting to look at the recent development of Pali-Thai translations. The first complete Thai translation of the Tipitaka has been published only in 1956 (and has been edited several times since), and a more recent translation published by the monastic university Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalay is quite different from that.

Beside comparing the different complete Thai versions and editions of the Tipitaka I also want to have a look at other Pali-to-Thai translations. It's quite difficult to find suitable translations for such a comparison. The ideal case would be the source text and the target text side by side. (->complete translations of the Tipitaka). The "almost ideal" (but rather rare) case is a target text quoting the source. (In most of these rare cases though it is not known  whether the author of the book has translated the text himself or just quoted somebody else's translation.) I found some of these rare cases (Buddhadasa, Sathianphong Wannapok) but would appreciate suggestions for more.

So if somebody knows about other translations not yet mentioned (by the way, I still lack translations from the 19th century, just have one so far), and if somebody has been involved in discussions about how to translate Pali into Thai (or may even know somebody who was/is part of a translation committee for the Thai Tipitaka), I will be glad if you could contact me.

Thanks for all these useful and interesting postings in this list!

Susi

PS: I am also grateful for remarks about similar phenomena of a specific translation style for translations from Pali to other languages than Thai. Are there also markers in use, and is there a tendency towards producing a more "natural sounding" target text at the expense of the tradition of translation?
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