Analyzing Translation Strategies for Allah’s Attributes in the Holy Qur’ān

Document Type : Original Research

Author

Department of English, Marvdasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marvdasht, Iran

Abstract

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.

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©2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.

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History

  • Receive Date: 24 February 2023
  • Revise Date: 10 May 2023
  • Accept Date: 04 June 2023

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