Make the Ageless Wisdom of Tibet Available to All

In an exciting start to the new year and new decade, our website and its social media channels continue to grow with fresh material and more visitors than ever. 

Over the last few months, we have continued to make steady progress on the Study Buddhism website as we begin a large expansion project, bringing a total of 10 new languages to the website. We now have translators in place and are currently working on creating interfaces and the initial articles in Sinhala, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Thai, Korean, Tamil, Marathi, Nepali and Bengali. This work will bring the Study Buddhism website to the more than 630 million native speakers of these languages, covering most of the traditionally Buddhist southeast Asian region, as well as India. We are very excited to share these sections with you later this year.

Our translators and editors have prepared over 270 new articles and over 340 new subtitle files, working out to 7 new translations completed every single day! We’ve published on our YouTube channel 39 more short videos taken from 3 interviews and edited and filmed further video interviews, preparing them now for subtitling in our different languages. You’ll find all the details in the bulleted list below.

As part of the ongoing process to make the website user-friendly, our English editor has copyedited 118 articles, making them more concise and easier to read. We have also started the project of tagging our English articles, so that users of the website can find related material quickly and easily.

Here are some of our accomplishment over these three months:

• Preparation and indexing of tags for 1457 English articles
• Translation of 277 articles
• Translation of 347 subtitle files
• Addition of 19 audio files
• Transcription of 8 audio files
• Copyediting of 118 English articles
• Finding and securing translation teams for preparation of Sinhala, Burmese, Lao, Khmer and Tamil sections, to join Thai, Korean Marathi, Nepali and Bengali sections under construction
• Construction of the frameworks in our Content Management System for Marathi, Nepali, Bengali, Sinhala, Tamil, Khmer, Lao and Burmese sections
• Translation of 58 Interface files and 84 articles for the 10 new language sections under preparation
• Subtitling and addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of 10 videos of an interview with Charok Lama, a young tulku and Buddhist teacher, currently studying at Sera Monastery in South India, and embedding them in various appropriate articles on the website
• Subtitling and addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel 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
• Editing of 19 videos of an interview with Professor Donald Broom, a biologist and emeritus professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, UK, one of the world’s leading authorities on ethical behavior and morality among animals.
• Subtitling and addition to the Study Buddhism YouTube channel of the above-mentioned interview clips with Professor Donald Broom.
• Editing of 22 videos of an interview with Dr Murray Corke, a Clinical Teacher at the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine and a Zen Buddhist teacher in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.
• Video recording of an interview with His Eminence Dagyab Rinpoche, the spiritual director of Tibet House Germany and one of the Gelug tradition’s highest tulkus.
• Optimization of our internal search engine 
• Implementation of algorithms for searching non-alphabetic based languages 
• Optimization of our glossary to include searched-for non-English terms
• Creation of scripts to generate the word count and list the descriptions for articles 
• Creation of an administrative interface for redirection of articles with title changes 
•  Automation of validation for redirects 
• Updating of Ruby language versions, Sitemap and Yandex metrics

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