Strategies Applied by Native and Non-native Translators to Transfer Polysyndeton: A case study on the Holy Qur’an

Abstract

‘Fa’ and ‘wa’ are two frequently used conjunctions in Arabic language creating a figure of speech called polysyndeton. As far as there is no exact equivalence in English possessing all functions of ‘fa’,it is unlikely to preserve this figure of speech in English translation of those sentences in which polysyndeton is created by ‘fa’.However, in the case of ‘wa’, polysyndeton can be kept in English translation because ‘wa’ and ‘and’ match in most functions (ten out of sixteen functions).In this research all verses in four surahs in the holy Qur’an containing this figure of speech were identified and their English translations by two native Arab and two non-native English speaking translatorswere compared. The results of the data analysis revealed that the translations by native translators (Mohammad Shakir and Talal Itani) were more ‘faithful’ to the original text. This could be due to the fact that they were aware of Arabic language tendency towards frequent use of conjunctions. On the other hand the non-native translators (Pickthal and Arberry) had a tendency towards higher degree of naturalness than the native translators. In these translations, the procedure of translation with different conjunction had the highest frequency for rendering the conjunctions.