This article provides quantitative evidence for a hypothesis concerning fourth-century translations of Indian Buddhist texts from Prakrit and Sanskrit into Chinese. Using a Variable Length n-Gram Feature Extraction Algorithm, principal component analysis and average linkage clustering we are able to show that 24 sutras, attributed by the tradition to different translators, were in fact translated by the same translator or group of translators. Since part of our method is based on assigning weight to n-grams, the analysis is capable of yielding distinctive features, i.e. strings of Chinese characters, that are characteristic of the translator(s). This is the first time that these techniques have successfully been applied to medieval Chinese texts. The results of this study open up a number of new directions for the lexicographic and syntactic study of early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts.
目次
1. Introduction 119 2. Previous Research 121 3. Quantitative Analysis 122 3.1 Corpus 122 3.2 n-Gram Feature Extraction 122 3.3 PCA 123 3.3.1 PCA analysis result with bi-gram features 3.3.2 PCA analysis result with tri-gram features 4. Variable Length n-Gram Feature Extraction 128 5. Quantitative Analysis II 128 5.1 Analysis with Variable Length n-Grams 128 5.2 Hierarchical Clustering 130 6. Conclusions and Future Research 132
