Xuan Zang’s Five Transliterations Revisited: A Corpus Linguistic Study of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra

Abstract

This paper examines the early translation theory of the Five Transliterations, which has been considered to be proposed by Xuan Zang back to 1300 years before, through corpus linguistic methods. The statistics based on our Sanskrit-Chinese Parallel corpus of Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra reveals that there exists very weak linguistic evidence that Xuan Zang proposed such a translation theory. The tension between historically recorded translation theories and practice is also discussed based on our findings. It is recommended that a corpus linguistic study may play a significant role in analyzing historical translation documents.