Strategies Opted for in Translating Twelve Categories of Quranic Terms

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to touch upon the Quranic terms and the strategies being opted for in their translations. To facilitate analyzing the data, the following steps have been taken: (a) classifying Quranic terms and their English equivalents (b) specifying the strategies of rendering them through applying Ordudari and Mollanazar’s (2016) model (based on Aixela’s (1996) model), (c) determining the frequency of each translation strategy (d) and examining the existence of a relationship between the frequency of a strategy and its effectiveness. It was found out that 40% of all Islamic terms and concepts belong to proper names (PNs) and 52% of PNs consist of God’s name. There has also been no conspicuous regularity or consistency in the strategies employed in rendering Quranic terms. Aixela’s general strategies of ‘conservation’ and ‘substitution’ have been identified as the least and the most frequently employed strategies, respectively. Finally, as far as the sub-strategies are concerned, ‘synonymy’ and ‘linguistic translation’ were found to be the most repeatedly used ‘substitution’ and ‘conservation’ strategies, respectively. The two least often utilized conservation strategies are ‘repetition’ and ‘intertextual gloss’. From among the substitution strategies, ‘autonomous creation’ and ‘deletion’ has been used less than the rest. Finally, neither of the potentially most effective strategies of EG, IG, EC and IC were found to be the most frequently used strategy. Interestingly, IG and EG are even less repeated than the least helpful strategies of OA and AU.