The English Translations of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi: A translational textual analysis

Abstract

The study aims to find out the reader-centred & author-centred translation of Ashtadhyayi of Panini, an Indian linguist of 5th century BC, who compiled the world oldest, shortest and ever first linguistic book in Sanskrit language focusing on all linguistic aspects, aiming at protecting the sounds of Vedas; the holy book of Hinduism. The linguistic importance of Sanskrit was firstly mentioned by William Jones during his famous address in India, whereas the linguistic phenomena were discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure in nineteenth century. The book is first translated into English in 1891by Sarisa Chandra Vasu with a large number of Sanskrit Words which gained a momentous fame in all the linguistic circles. Due to which Ashtadhyayi was studied widely by English professors and students illuminating their linguistic horizons by coining unique ambiguous precise 4000 rules under the name of ‘Sutra’. Just after this English translational creation of Ashtadhyayi a large number of translations were done by the native Hindu scholars and even by western Sanskritests. Therefore, a huge number of commentaries, studies and articles were written by European and native linguists and at the same time it was translated into other languages. The book and all its translations are available online. The purpose of this paper is to collect all the English translations of Ashtadhyayi throughout the history since 5th BC to the age of globalization and digitalization, then putting them into a translational categorization according to various kinds of translations finding out the most comprehensive and faithful translations among them and the types of translation strategies applied by the translators in translating this unique cryptic linguistic book.