Problems of studying Oirat and Mongolian translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts and prospects for their use in compiling parallel corpora

The article deals with the problems of a comparative study of the monuments of Buddhist literature in the Tibetan and Oirat languages. Over the past two and a half centuries, a lot of work has been done in domestic Mongolian studies to identify and describe the Mongolian and Oirat translations of Buddhist works, but so far a significant part of them has not been introduced into scientific circulation. Overcoming these difficulties in domestic oriental studies is solved by attracting new digital methods and software tools. One of them is the compilation of corpora of parallel bilingual texts. The data obtained in this way can be used not only in linguistic research, but also in cultural studies, Buddhism, literary criticism, translation theory and other areas. The samples of Buddhist literature were compiled in the Tibetan language. A large array of works of various genres was translated into the Oirat language by the famous scholar and writer Zaya Pandita Namkhai Jamtso (17th century) and his followers. It is this circle of texts in the Oirat “Todo Bichig” (“Clear Script”) and their primary sources in Tibetan that were taken as the basis for creating a corpus of parallel texts. A comparative analysis of these texts, translation rules from Tibetan into Oirat and Mongolian, based on the principles of literal and semantic translation, gives a lot in solving issues of software development, subsequent problems of aligning two texts, tasks of their segmentation, and so on. The developed corpus of texts from the written heritage of Zaya Pandita contributes to its preservation for future generations of researchers and all those interested in the spiritual culture of the Mongolian peoples, as well as raises the research in this area to a new level thanks to the digital resources involved.