What is your opinion of Bhikkhu Sujato's translations

With little choice I use Bhikkhu Sujato’s translations for TPR and TPP projects because they are CC0. (tpr will have line by line translations maybe next week)
What are your opinions of these translations?

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I see issues. But as you say it does allow for ease of use online.

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He does use some strange words… on the other hand, I did see that he translated some words according to the commentary. Like “eating one part of the day”
The translation is CC0 which means it can be modified and no credit or permission is needed.
so “astute” and “prudent” could be changed without problems.

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I feel Sujāto Bhante ’ s translation are not always completely correct. As translator he made some choices: “mendicant” for bhikkhu for exemple, it’s not wrong, but it deprives the Dhamma taste and put a limit to the meaning.
Thus for some word its best to let it untranslated, as the multiple meanings involved in Pāli and sometimes the lack of similar concepts in our languages.
Another issue is that he is allergic to commentaries and prefer to follow his own ideas, giving an unique personal translation asking the reader to follow hos view without discussion.
Also i feel the vocabulary used by Bhikkhu Bodhi is more rich and precise.
I definitely prefer Bhikkhu Bodhi ’ s translations.

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Perhaps we can redesign his translation and make a list of words that need alternate English replacements.

Grab a list for a global replacement of words.

My idea with TPR is to have the Pali /English replaceable… either with a dash “-” for each letter to help improve pali reading,

or replacing with the original pali word, or an alternative english word… this is some of the most basic programming tasks (search replace). We can have a lookup-replacement-table to do this.

It is cc0 (public domain). We can make a CT version if we want. And I might guess that was the whole intention of his cc0.

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Personally I only use his translations when i want the line by line, or if there are no other english translations of a text available. I dont consider them to be the best, but there’s only so much you can do and better than nothing imo.

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