Stylometric framework identifies early Chinese Buddhist translations

A new stylometric framework identifies the authorship of disputed early Chinese Buddhist translations by analyzing linguistic patterns.

Researchers developed a system that uses specific features reviewed by Buddhist philologists to determine the origins of ancient texts. The framework evaluates elements such as sentence length, part-of-speech n-grams, and specific sentence formulas. Unlike some automated models, this method allows scholars to see exactly which linguistic traits support a specific attribution.

The team built stylistic profiles from 31 authenticated translations produced by seven different translators between the Eastern Han and Western Jin periods in China. They used these profiles to examine eight disputed texts. The analysis suggests that two specific texts, T1557 and T0101, most closely match the confirmed work of the translator An Shigao. These results align with previous findings from a BERT-based machine learning approach.