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FAQ: MITRA Tools & DharmaNexus

MITRA Translate & Grammar

Q: What languages does MITRA Translate support?
A: Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, and Classical Chinese to a number of modern languages, which is slowly growing.`

Q: Can I translate text directly from images or PDFs?
A: Yes! You can upload images or PDFs for OCR and translation. The system supports direct screenshot-to-translation workflows.

Q: What is "English (Explained)" mode?
A: This mode adds grammatical explanations, including word segmentation, lemmatization, and morpho-syntactic analysis, to the translation. See MITRA Translate for more details.

Q: What is "English (Deep Research)" mode?
A: This advanced translation mode provides comprehensive research context by integrating semantic search across all language collections. It includes parallel discovery, contextual analysis, and evidence from secondary literature, making it ideal for serious academic work. See MITRA Deep Research for more details.

Q: How do I access Sanskrit grammatical analysis?
A: Enter Sanskrit text and click the 'grammar' button to see detailed analysis, including Sandhi segmentation and lemmatization.

Q: The Grammar Button disappeared. What happened?
The grammar button is only available for Sanskrit input currently. If you don't have any Sanskrit text in the translation window, it won't show.

Q: I get results from all kinds of texts in all kinds of languages, but it seems chaotic and not what I was expecting. What's wrong?
A: The best way to ensure that MITRA Search is finding what you are really looking for is by using the filter option to limit it to texts and collections that you are interested in.

Q: Why are the results from the Pāli Suttas not always the first? Or the Sūtras in Sanskrit, Chinese, or Tibetan?
A: MITRA Search ranks results primarily by their similarity and relevance to a search query. And while some users might find Pāli Suttas as first results most intuitive, this expectation can be very different for other users, and it is therefore difficult to provide a 'one fits all' solution. While we do attempt to rank results in light ways according to chronology as well, this is difficult to achieve consistently, and semantic similarity remains the key factor.

Q: Why am I not seeing more than 50 results at a time?
A: MITRA Search uses complex and advanced search mechanisms, and due to technical limitations, no more than 50 results can be retrieved at once. If you need more detailed results, we strongly suggest using filters to narrow down the results to specific areas of your interest.

DharmaNexus

Q: DharmaNexus, BuddhaNexus, I find this confusing. How do the two projects relate?
A: BuddhaNexus was the first prototype of the system (2019-2022), and DharmaNexus is its actively maintained successor platform that's now deeply integrated within the Dharmamitra ecosystem. See the note from our CTO Sebastian for more details.

Q: How does DharmaNexus find parallels?
A: It uses advanced semantic search and multilingual matching to highlight similar passages across texts and languages.

Q: When I flip the 'show match highlighting' switch, I see all kinds of colors on the text, this is super confusing. What does it mean and how does it work? A: The colors are a "heat map" that shows you how many similar passages have been found for a given segment of text. You can find a detailed explanation of how this works here.

Q: I'm a former BuddhaNexus user. What's different in DharmaNexus? A: DharmaNexus has a few key changes: match highlighting is now off by default (you'll need to enable it), the color scheme is updated for better readability (though the classic BuddhaNexus theme is still available), and search is now powered by the more advanced MITRA Search. Some specific datasets of BuddhaNexus are not available on DharmaNexus, but we are working on offering well-curated improvements in the coming months.

Q: Can I use DharmaNexus on my phone?
A: Yes and No. You can use it to browse and read texts on your phone, but it's not suited for viewing intertextual connections. For that, we recommend you to use a desktop PC or laptop to take advantage of the multi-column layout.