Although I have completed the revision of The Jātaka Translation in 6 volumes, I am still working on the Jātaka material, this is mainly because of the unsatisfactory nature of the translation of the verses, which is often quite inaccurate, much more so than the prose parts for instance.
The first thing I have done is retranslate the first three Jātakas in their entirety, which will give the student an idea of how the Pāli is structured, which is often very different from English, and also how we can get that into a satisfactory translation.
One of the main problems with the current translation of the Jātakas is that they omit a translation of the word commentary on the verses. As this amounts to around 20% of the commentary, that is a substantial amount that was excised. In these currect translations the word commentaries are translated in full.
An example of how illuminating this can be can be found in the translation of the Apaṇṇakajātaka, The Story about what is Unquestionable, which has an extensive word commentary including a quotation of the entire Apaṇṇakasutta (AN 3.16), showing how the Jātaka and Sutta teachings are aligned.
There are two versions of these new translations: the Text and Translation interlinear version follows the Pāḷi more exactly, so that sentence structure can be seen and understood; the English-only translation rewrites that translation into a more fluent English rendering, and omits some of the word commentary where it doesn’t add anything to our understanding in English.
I have also remade my translation of Naḷinikājātaka (Ja 526) to bring it into line with the presentation of these new Jātaka translations, and of the Kacchapajātaka (Ja 273). Both are again available in two versions, and include translations of the word commentaries.
I have also updated The Jātaka Translation itself to include these latter two, as the originals were heavily edited, and in the case of the Kacchapajātaka the main portion was only translated into Latin in the original translation. The reason for this was because of the sexual content of these Jātakas, which was not felt to be suitable for a Victorian audience. In this book, however, I do not include the word commentary.
I am at present working on a retranslation of the verses and word commentaries of at least the first book of the Jātaka (150 verses), and maybe the first two books (total around 500 verses), but that will need more time before I can get it published. I hope meanwhile that the student can get a better idea of the Jātaka material through this handful of retranslations.
