The Draft Translation with Two Bad Choices
A second-year HSC candidate is translating a sixty-word prose passage from a Jain narrative in Jain Maharashtri. The passage includes five features: (i) bhavadi where Sanskrit has bhavati; (ii) the genitive tāsa; (iii) a passive kīradi continuing Sanskrit kriyate; (iv) the particle vi continuing Sanskrit api; and (v) the compound dhammasāra. The candidate's first draft renders bhavadi as 'was', vi as 'also', dhammasāra as 'the essence of religion', and silently drops tāsa. The teacher's comment is that two of these four choices are defensible and two are not, and that the candidate must show the grammatical reasoning for each. The candidate has twenty-five minutes, no dictionary, and must also decide whether to keep the compound intact. The passage is part of a set text, and marks are awarded for justified choices rather than for elegance.
1. The draft has four choices: bhavadi → 'was'; vi → 'also'; dhammasāra → 'essence of religion'; tāsa → omitted. Identify the two defensible choices and the two indefensible ones, and give the grammatical reason for each verdict.
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Work from the form to the function, not from English idiom.
- bhavadi → 'was' is indefensible. bhavadi is the third-person singular present of the root bhū-, showing the regular Maharashtri treatment of intervocalic -t- as -d- (bhavati > bhavadi). Rendering it as a past tense changes the tense of the whole clause and removes the only finite present verb.
- vi → 'also' is defensible. vi continues Sanskrit api and is an additive particle ('also, even, too'). It is not a logical connector, so 'therefore' would be wrong even though the surrounding sentence happens to sound like a conclusion.
- dhammasāra → 'essence of religion' is defensible. It is a two-member tatpuruṣa with dhamma- as first member; the second member is predicated of the first in a genitive relation. The rendering preserves both members and the relation.
- Dropping tāsa is indefensible. The genitive is a syntactic marker, not decoration; omitting it leaves the following noun unattached.
The defensible pair is therefore vi and dhammasāra.
2. Write the note you would add for tāsa. What case is it, what does it govern, and what are the two acceptable ways of rendering it?
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tāsa is the genitive singular of the ta- pronoun, continuing Sanskrit tasya. In this clause it governs the following noun and marks a possessive or genitive relation between two referents.
Two renderings are acceptable:
- Keep it as a possessive - 'his X', 'her X', 'its X' - where the possessor is already known from the preceding clause.
- Recast the clause so the possessor becomes a subject or an 'of'-phrase - 'the X of that one'.
The choice between them is stylistic, not grammatical: either is defensible as long as the relation survives. What is not acceptable is silent omission. A deleted genitive is the commonest cause of a translation in which every word is correct but the sentence has lost its spine. In a Jain narrative passage the genitive often carries a doctrinal relation (possessor of merit, of a vow, of a body), so the note should also say which noun is being governed.
3. The candidate must decide whether to keep dhammasāra as a single compound or split it into a clause. What criterion should decide, and what would you do here?
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The criterion is whether the compound is a lexicalised term or an ad hoc collocation, and whether the target language has an equally compact equivalent.
dhammasāra is a short two-member tatpuruṣa that behaves as a fixed term in Jain vocabulary. Splitting it - 'the essence, which is dhamma' - adds words without adding information, and in a sixty-word passage the added words distort the balance of the original. Keep it as a single noun phrase: 'essence of dhamma'.
Splitting is appropriate when the compound is a long bahuvrīhi that has to be unpacked to be understood, or when its members are being separately predicated in the sentence. That is not the case here.
The practical test is: does splitting change the information? If it does not, keep the compound and gloss it once in a footnote. Consistency matters too - the same compound should be treated the same way each time it occurs in the set text.