An Investigation of Word Order in Persian and English Translations of the Holy Qur’ān

Abstract

Word order is one of the most important elements in the structure of any language. Some translators believe that in the Holy Qur’ān, word order plays a significant part in conveying meaning and thus any change in the word order results in distortion of divine words; they therefore try their best to preserve the word order of the original in their translations. The present paper investigates word order in a number of Persian and English translations of the Holy Qur’ān. It is discussed that some language peculiarities are effective in opting for SL or TL word order in translation. It is argued that some of the peculiarities of Persian language enable the translators to preserve the word order of the source language; in fact, even in cases where a marked word order in the target language makes the translation closer to the original, translators have preferred the marked TL word order. As regards English translations, most of them have used a natural TL word order; this is because English is case assigner, i.e. any change in its word order may result in a change in meaning or an ungrammatical structure.