مطالب

The translation of sacred texts has been a long-standing practice, employed by followers of various religions to disseminate their beliefs. The Qur’ān, revered by Muslims as a divine miracle, is one such text that has attracted the attention of translators and researchers across different periods. Given the Qur’ān’s divine origin and its linguistic intricacies, its translation poses a significant challenge. This article adopts a corpus-based approach to investigate the extent to which the nuanced semantics of the Qur’ān’s moral terms have been captured in English translations. Specifically, the words “Marouf”, “Munkar”, and “Sin” and their translations by Arberry, Picktall, Shaker, and Yusuf Ali were examined using Izutsu’s semantic analysis approach. This approach analyzes the fundamental and relational meanings of key Qur’ānic terms from syntagmatic/paradigmatic and synchronic /diachronic perspectives to reveal the worldview they embody. The study’s findings indicate that translators often used identical vocabulary to translate the aforementioned moral terms across all contexts, paying insufficient attention to the contextual nuances of these Qur’ānic moral terms. Despite the use of interpretive techniques in translating the Qur’ān, it appears that even the most accurate English translations fall short of conveying the original concepts and their subtleties fully. This study offers valuable insights for Qur’ān translators, acquainting them with the nuanced semantic aspects of Qur’ānic terms and the delicate task of reflecting these nuances in their translations.

The translation of proper nouns, such as Allah’s attributes of acts, has consistently been a contentious issue in the translation of Qur’ānic exegesis. This research aimed to investigate the frequency and types of strategies employed in the English translations of Allah’s attributes of acts in the Holy Qur’ān. The study sought to explore the strategies used by translators in the translation of Qur’ānic exegesis and to determine if significant differences existed among the translators in the application of the strategies proposed by Chesterman (1997). The corpus comprised six English translations of the Holy Qur’ān by Asad, Pickthall, Saheeh, Arberry, Khan and Hilali, and Mubarakpuri. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were utilized to analyze the data, based on a revised version of Chesterman’s (1997) model. The descriptive data revealed that only six out of ten strategies were used in translating Allah’s attributes of acts. Only two strategies, transposition and emphasis change, were not used significantly differently, while the other four strategies, synonymy, paraphrase, transliteration, and expansion, were employed significantly differently. The inferential statistics revealed significant differences in the application of each strategy by each translator. However, no significant differences were found among the translators in the application of the same strategy when rendering Allah’s attributes of acts.