Meditation / Mindfulness Content Translation

When the source is a guided meditation script, exercise guide, posture instruction, or breathing practice (rather than a Dharma talk, sutra commentary, or teaching text), use a lighter workflow than the full dharma-translation pipeline.

Register

Default to warm, direct instructional voice (Thầy-adjacent):

Inclusive first person ("we") for describing the practice and shared experience; second person ("you") for direct step-by-step guidance
Concrete images, sensory details
Oral rhythm, short sentences
Present tense, imperative mood

MB corpus consultation is NOT needed for register — this content type has its own well-established English conventions (yoga/meditation instructional voice).

Person and subject (most-reviewed issue in this genre)

Chinese meditation prose drops subjects; English must not. The human reviewer's #1 fix was to supply and keep a consistent person as subject — almost always "we" for shared experience, "you" for direct guidance — and never to drift into abstract third person ("people," "one") or leave a sentence subjectless. Every sentence needs a named subject, and the reference chain across sentences must stay consistent (don't hop between "we," "the practitioner," and an inanimate noun). For the full pattern library from a human-reviewed manuscript, read ../mpi-translation-review/references/meditation-practice-translation.md.

Terms

Terms DB lookup for Buddhist-mindfulness vocabulary is useful but limited to key terms:

正念 → mindfulness
觉知 → awareness
无我 → depends on context: "non-self" for philosophical/Dharma content; "selflessly" for embodied/movement instruction where the sense is no separate controller imposing on the action
中道 → Middle Way
丹田 → dantian (keep as-is; well-known in meditation/qigong)

Context-sensitive terms:

心 (xīn): in meditation/movement contexts it often means "mind/attention" not emotional "heart." 持心 means holding the mind with focused attention, not holding with emotion.
念 (niàn): mindfulness/attention/recollection — context between these.
Buddhist philosophical terms (无我, 空, 缘起) in non-philosophical contexts (movement instruction, body scans) may need practical/concrete translations rather than doctrinal ones.

Skip deep terms alignment unless dense Dharma vocabulary (emptiness, dependent origination, Buddha-nature, etc.) appears in the text.

Comparison files

Still create 对照.dj as usual. See comparison file format in this skill.

Pitfalls

Don't add formatting the source doesn't have: sub-section labels using 【】 in Chinese should become plain [label] in English, not *[label]* or **[label]**. Match the source's formatting level exactly.
**text** is Markdown, not Djot: Djot emphasis uses single asterisks (*text*). Never use double asterisks in .dj files.
心 ≠ heart by default: in meditation/movement contexts, 持心 = holding the mind with attention, not holding with emotion. Translate based on context, not dictionary defaults.

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