Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

Another busy and productive three months have passed as we approach the year’s end. Our online material and number of visitors, both to our Studybuddhism website and our various social media channels, continue to grow.

It is exciting to see our new Thai and Korean sections starting to take shape, with the Universal Values articles for both now complete. We still need many more articles translated before we can launch these sections online but, like at the construction site of a tall building, the foundation is now there.

We are delighted to announce that we have started work on a Bengali section as well. Bengali is not only the main language of Bangladesh, but also the second most widely spoken native language in India, and with its addition we will have completed fulfilling the Dalai Lama’s request to make the wisdom of Tibet available in all the major languages of the Islamic world. Interest in such topics as “how to deal with anger,” “methods for dealing with life,” and so on is rapidly growing in these regions. Compared to last year, the number of visitors to our website from Iran has increased 313%, from Afghanistan 295%, from Pakistan 154% and from Iraq 103%. People in these regions are increasingly finding our material helpful for coping with the difficulties they face.

We have also added a new, professional, full-time English editor to our growing staff. She will focus on the many unedited transcripts presently online on our website, as well the backlog of those not yet there. In the short time she has been working, she has already edited 18 articles, making them much more reader-friendly.

Meanwhile, our technical team has been busy with the extremely challenging, complex task of building a new, customized internal search engine for the material on our website. Beautifully redesigned and language specific, search results include all word variations for single terms and phrases in the searched language. Each search result offers a teaser passage from the article in which the term or phrase is found, as well as the title, description and location of the article. If a searched term or phrase appears in the glossary of the language searched for, the search result also includes in a header the definition and a link to the glossary page for further information.

Here is a more detailed summary of what we have accomplished this quarter:

• Translation of 262 articles into our various 21 languages and addition of them to the Study Buddhism website
• Translation of 203 subtitle files into our various languages for our videos
• Transcription of 7 English audio files
• Creation in our content management system of a Thai section, with Interface and slug transliteration
• Ongoing development of the internal search engine
• Automation of the weekly republishing of the website with the newly uploaded material of the week (over 20 articles on average), so as to avoid slowdowns if each new article is published individually
• Addition to the Study Buddhism SoundCloud channel of 38 audio files
• Subtitling and addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of 16 videos of an interview with Tsultrim Allione, Buddhist teacher and author, founder of Tara Mandala, and embedding them in various appropriate articles on the website
• Editing of 10 videos of an interview with Charok Lama, a young tulku and Buddhist teacher, currently studying at Sera Monastery in South India 
• Editing of 10 videos of an interview with Venerable Robina Courtin, one of the most well-known female Buddhist teachers of today, and founder of Liberation Prison Project, bringing Buddhism into prisons across the world
• Video recording of an interview with Professor Imtiyaz Yusuf, Coordinator of the Islam and Buddhism Programme at The International Institute of Islamic Civilisation and Malay World (ISTAC-IIUM), Malaysia

All of this hard work is made possible by your continuing generous support. Together, we shall “Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All.”

Links:

• Study Buddhism website of the Berzin Archives
• Study Buddhism on Facebook
• Study Buddhism on YouTube