巴利數位文獻資源現況評述與未來展望 -- 兼談「初期佛教聖典多語多本平行語料庫」的幾點構想=A Discussion of the Present Situation and Future Prospects of Pāli Digital Resources: With some Remarks on the "Multilingual Parallel Corpus of Early Buddhist Texts"
During the last 10 years, due to the rapid developments in information technology, great achievements have been made in the digitization of Pāli texts. The author has commented on these achievements before and the first part of the present paper serves to summarize our previous findings. The second part critically examines different aspects of these resources, including the directions and characteristics of their development, their benefits for research, and unresolved problems. In summary it can be said that, although, in order to offer a more critical basis for research, the digital resources are constantly improved in terms of their volume, their editorial criticism, and their search and extract functionality, so far only relatively low levels of refinement and detail (ie, lower criticism) have been achieved. In the last part of this paper we will in a case study try to gauge the possibilities for future developments in Pāli digital resources. Our planned project tries to build a parallel corpus of Buddhist scriptures that is multilingual, spans different versions and translations and encodes “linguistic annotations” in order to surpass previous resources and express the texts on a higher level of refinement and detail (ie, higher criticism). This kind of multi-lingual parallel corpus of different editions, can not only raise the level of criticism of traditional Buddhist studies, but also support research in the translation of Buddhist scriptures, as well as translation itself, and record the understanding of language in the process of translation. Moreover the corpus will offer benefits for linguistic research and language learning. With its help we will be able to produce better language reference books such as grammar books and dictionaries. It is a multi-functional, multi-valent database that shows a possible direction for the future development of Buddhist digital resources.
