Xuan Zang’s Five Transliterations Revisited: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra

Authors

  • Xiaodong Yang College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China
  • Zhen LI College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.5.25

Keywords:

Xuan Zang, the Five Transliterations, Buddhist translation, Sanskrit-Chinese corpus, Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra

Abstract

This paper examines the early translation theory of the Five Transliterations, which has been considered to be proposed by Xuan Zang back to 1300 years before, through corpus linguistic methods. The statistics based on our Sanskrit-Chinese Parallel corpus of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra reveals that there exists very weak linguistic evidence that Xuan Zang proposed such a translation theory. The tension between historically recorded translation theories and practice is also discussed based on our findings. It is recommended that a corpus linguistic study may play a significant role in analyzing historical translation documents.

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Published

2021-05-30

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 5

Section

Research Article

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Xiaodong Yang, Zhen LI

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Yang, X., & LI, Z. (2021). Xuan Zang’s Five Transliterations Revisited: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 4(5), 226-235. https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.5.25