Sources and verification

KinhMõ shows a Vietnamese prayer text and settles translations, pronunciation and meanings on top of it. You should be able to read where those layers come from and how reliable they are, rather than having to take my word for it. That is what this page is for.

What the translations rest on

The translation tracks are anchored to free-distribution Dharma editions published by the Buddha Educational Foundation (budaedu.org) — among them the English Earth Store Sūtra (Kinh Địa Tạng), a Vietnamese edition of the same text, and a trilingual edition of the requiem liturgy. The English translation of the Earth Store Sūtra is the work of the Buddhist Text Translation Society (BTTS); budaedu distributes it free of charge, but the translation is BTTS's own and is named here explicitly.

These books carry a printed notice: they are strictly for free distribution and are not to be sold. KinhMõ is free and non-commercial — which is what that condition asks.

Anchored means in meaning, never word for word. The German and English lines in the app are not transcriptions of those editions. They are renderings of their own that use the editions as a meaning reference — look up how a passage is understood, then phrase it for this line in this language. The Vietnamese original is untouched by all of it: never replaced, only added to.

Where the German comes from

For the liturgy itself there was no German edition to anchor to. So the German is worked out from the verified English and from German-language Dharma texts where they exist for the matter at hand, and then goes through the same check as everything else: a back-translation into English that shows whether meaning was lost on the way.

German and English are meant to be equally rich. A word that carries three senses in English should carry them in German too — not quietly shrink to one because the source happened to be monolingual.

Dictionary, characters and glossary

The built-in dictionary of roughly 28,049 entries is assembled from four sources:

• English Wiktionary — Vietnamese headwords with English definitions, licensed CC-BY-SA.
• German Wiktionary — around a thousand Vietnamese headwords with curated German definitions, also CC-BY-SA. They take precedence over anything carried across from the English.
• The Unihan database from Unicode — the Hán-Việt readings, that is, the Chinese characters behind a Vietnamese word and how they are read (Unicode license).
• The canonical glossary — 308 hand-curated entries for this book's Buddhist terminology, terms and figures alike, each with German and English. Where it applies it outranks the dictionary, because a word in this book often means something more specific than it does in everyday speech.

FreeDict is named in the app as a dictionary source but supplies nothing: the FreeDict catalog has no Vietnamese pair. It is listed there for honesty — and because it explains why the German meanings have to come from the other three.

How it gets checked

I do not read Vietnamese. So “I checked it” cannot be the answer here, and the checking is a built-in step of the work instead — with a deliberate gradation.

Canonical and doctrinal terms — sūtra titles, the names of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, statements about what a text says — go through a separate check against authoritative sources: Plum Village, CBETA, SuttaCentral, Wikipedia. Separate is meant literally: whoever wrote a translation may not verify it, so the check runs as its own pass that has the draft in front of it as nothing but text. It never ends in a shrug: every verdict carries the source's address, the moment it was retrieved, and the sentence quoted word for word that it rests on. If it finds nothing, it says “not sourced” — not “looks fine”.

Everyday vocabulary — the ordinary Vietnamese that makes up most of any text — is in none of those sources. Those meanings are worked out with AI assistance, from the context of this book and read against the parallel editions. That is not a fallback but a deliberate choice: better a labelled meaning than none at all.

And you can see which you are looking at. Every entry in Lookup carries a small tag at the bottom, per language: “verified source”, “German Wiktionary” or “editorial · AI-assisted”. That tag is the real point of this page — it is the short version of everything written here, in the exact place where you need it.

What stays in the app

The licence notices themselves stay where they belong: in the app, under Settings → About & licenses. Wiktionary with its CC-BY-SA licence, the Unihan database, the glossary and the budaedu/BTTS credit are all there — and in Lookup, every entry says which of those sources it came from. This page does not replace any of that; it tells the part there is no room for.

If an attribution is missing, something is credited wrongly, or you want to know what a particular line rests on: support@kinhmo.com.