Translating and Searching This Website

 

Translating


Translation is a tricky business.

According to an old Italian aphorism (tradurre è tradire), to translate is to betray. Whether we are translating from the ancient Pāli language or any other language, the very act of translation can inadvertently distort the original meanings and connotations of any given passage. Great translations fall in the realm of art, not technology.

That said, if a website is not written in your preferred language, there is a quick way to roughly translate the majority of the site’s text into another language. Scroll all the way down to the footer on any page.

Then click the small triangle for a drop-down table of over 100 languages. Just select a language from that table, and the entire site will be automatically translated. Above, you can see a sample that has been translated into Italian. There is a menu bar at the very top that makes it easy to switch back to the original English (or turn off the translation altogether). Although the translation can be rather crude, I’ve found this to be a useful feature.

To read about how to search any website (using Google Translate) see the PDF: Translating the Website.

 

Searching


The footer of any page of this website also has a Google Search facility that provides links to pages containing the terms in question.

Here, for example, we see some of the results returned when we searched for the monastery, Abhayagiri:

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