Shift Strategies in Translation of the Holy Qur’an into English

Authors

Abstract

This research was an attempt to discover the most frequent shifts in English translations of the Qur'an using Vinay and Darbelnet's framework. The corpus of the study consisted of five English translations of the Qur'an (those of Shakir, Ghali, Yusuf Ali, Arberry and Pickthall) prepared to be analyzed manually to discover the shifts. The researchers found that in order for the translations of the Qur’an to be exact and faithful equivalents to the Original, shifts are indispensable. Shifts take different forms: structural, cultural, stylistic and semantic. This study revealed that the most frequently occurring shifts are structural and semantic ones. The frequency of shifts in each sub-corpus as well as their frequencies in the entire corpus are measured and discussed.

Author Biographies

Salar Manafi Anari

Full Professor, Department of English Translation, Allameh Tabataba’i University

Zahra Saghar

MA graduate of English Translation, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch

Published

2011-03-11

How to Cite

Manafi Anari, S., & Saghar, Z. (2011). Shift Strategies in Translation of the Holy Qur’an into English. Iranian Journal of Translation Studies, 8(32). Retrieved from https://journal.translationstudies.ir/ts/article/view/453

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 32 (2011)

Section

Academic Research Paper

License

Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).