Blur the Linguistic Boundary: Interpreting Chinese Buddhist Sutra in English via Neural Machine Translation

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel neural machine translation approach specifically designed for translating Chinese Buddhist scriptures into English, addressing the limitations of general Chinese-English NMT in this specialized domain.

Contribution

The study introduces a specialized NMT model tailored for Buddhist texts, improving translation accuracy over general models in this niche field.

Findings

Achieved highly promising translation results in ablation experiments

Demonstrated effectiveness of domain-specific NMT for religious texts

Outperformed general Chinese-English NMT models in this domain

Abstract

Buddhism is an influential religion with a long-standing history and profound philosophy. Nowadays, more and more people worldwide aspire to learn the essence of Buddhism, attaching importance to Buddhism dissemination. However, Buddhist scriptures written in classical Chinese are obscure to most people and machine translation applications. For instance, general Chinese-English neural machine translation (NMT) fails in this domain. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to building a practical NMT model for Buddhist scriptures. The performance of our translation pipeline acquired highly promising results in ablation experiments under three criteria.