Strategies Adopted in Translating Quranic Single Words in an Ancient Glossary

Abstract

Iranians were the first non-Arab nation who translated the whole Quran and its single words. Their endeavour from the early Islamic era to compile the Quranic Persian glossaries is admirable. This paper intends to demonstrate an Iranian translator's strategies adopted in translating Quranic single words into Persian. The said translator, who lived about seven hundred years ago, like any modern translator, used the same strategies known to translation scholars today. Some of these strategies were: providing suitable equivalents for each word that could preserve its function and structure, accompanying translated words with a short or long description, translating a word into an Arabic-Persian compound phrase and finally annotating the untranslatable borrowed words (i.e. Arabic loan words) that were used in the Qura'n.