محمد یزدانی

This study aimed to assess the quality of English translations of Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A.) letters addressing the youth in the West based on House’s revised (1997) model of translation quality assessment. Such texts are considered political and/ or religious, and their translations require meticulous quality assessment. Yet, rarely did the researchers find any study addressing this important area of translation. Therefore, the current study, which employed a qualitative type of research, focused on the translation of such type of texts. The assessment revealed dimensional mismatches between the original and the translated versions in the areas of field, tenor, and mode. The findings of the current study can help improve the quality of the translation of the speech.

In reciting the verses of the Holy Qur’ān, making pauses at appropriate places is one of the important issues of Tajwid, neglecting which can potentially distort the meanings of the verses and reverse their intended purpose. The present study seeks to analyze how translators have dealt with the concept of inappropriate pause by investigating four English translations of the Holy Qur’ān through answering the following questions: Has the concept of inappropriate or impermissible pause been observed in the English translations of the Holy Qur’ān? Is it possible to express the concept of inappropriate pause using English punctuation? If yes, is it possible to achieve a standard to convey the concept of inappropriate pause? If not, how can this gap be filled? Through a comparative analysis of all 68 cases of inappropriate pause in the Holy Qur’ān and their corresponding translations into English, it seems that English lacks equivalent punctuation to convey the concept of inappropriate pause. Based on the obtained results, it can be concluded that colon is the most appropriate punctuation in English to convey the concept of inappropriate pause. However, the findings of this research show that the translators used commas in 43.7% of the verses with impermissible pauses. The authors presented a “standards table” by examining the function of English punctuation marks, and by observing the approach taken by the translators when facing an inappropriate pause, a “descriptive table” was also presented to illustrate these observations. Then, considering the relationship between these two tables, the closest English punctuation mark for conveying the concept of inappropriate pause was introduced.

The present study centered around the problem of functional equivalence in source-text-target-text pairs. In fact, this study was an attempt to investigate patterns of professional translators’ main approaches to the production of functionally equivalent Qur’ānic translations. The ultimate objective was to investigate the practicality of Reiss’s theoretical functionalist text-oriented model of translation. Hence, five selected English translations were descriptively and linguistically analyzed and compared with their corresponding Qur’ānic surahs. The analysis included content-specific and formal features of the texts to discover common and frequent translation strategies applied in the production of each target text. The descriptive findings were then calculated using frequency and percentage. The findings on the translations of the informative and expressive texts revealed that Reiss’s relevant prediction was right. However, in contrast to Reiss’s view, the operative text was mostly translated literally rather than adaptively by most of the translators.