The obvious difficulties of technical translation between European languages are compounded when using translations from non-European languages. These have been confronted by many authors who have made available materials, especially from Oriental traditions. No attempt has been made to use source material not already translated into English. Commentators frequently stress the clarity of the original text in explaining subtleties that do not readily lend themselves to expression in English. This is particularly the case with Sanskrit and Pali.
Traces seem to linger even in the intricate formalism preferred by the commentators.
This translation presents many formidable problems, mainly either epistemological and psychological, or else linguistic, they relate either to what ideas and things are being discussed, or else to the manipulation of dictionary meanings of words used in discussion. Here the English translator can forsake the Pali allotment of synonyms and indulge a liking for 'elegant variation', if he has it, without fear of muddle. In the Suttas and still more in the Abhidhamma, charting by analysis and definition of pin-pointed mental states is carried far into unfamiliar waters. It was already recognized then that this is no more a solid landscape of 'things' to be pointed to when variation has resulted in vagueness. But here the whole mental structure with its temporal-dynamic process is dealt with too.