Evaluating Translations of the Holy Qur’an for Children within the Framework of Skopos Theory

Abstract

The present study aims to evaluate the strategies applied to translate the Holy Qur’an for children, and intends to demonstrate that according to Skopos theory, different translators employ various strategies when translating the Holy Qur’an for children. To achieve this goal, translations done by Rahmandoust, Fouladvand, Elahi Ghomshei and Khorramshahi are studied and compared. The first studied translation has been conducted specifically for children, while three others have not specified any particular age range for their audience. The findings indicate that Rahmandoust has utilized the following strategies proposed by Chesterman (1997) to present a translation appropriate for children: at semantic level (cohesion change, repetition), syntactic level (distribution change, simplification) and pragmatic level (explicitation, information change, coherence change and visibility change). Considering the aforementioned findings, this conclusion can be drawn that most strategies are applied to the pragmatic level when considering children as readers of the translation.