Transformation of Cohesive Tools and Explicitation in English Translations of the Holy Quran (A Case Study of surah Yusuf)

Abstract

This article is a contrastive study to investigate the transformation of language differences from source language to target language during the process of translation. The very first emphasis of the present article is to make clear the differences of cohesive tools (in this study, conjunctions) in the source language (the Arabic language of the Holy Qur'an) and the target language (the English translations of the Qur'an) and the explicitation of these tools in the translated texts. For this, the surah of Yusuf has been contrastively compared with its five English translations, i.e. translations of M.H. Shakir, Mohsin Khan, M. M. Pikthhal, Yusuf Ali. A. Qaribullah. The results show that the differences of cohesive tools in the source and target languages need a high amount of explicitation during the process of translation. Meanwhile, this study clarifies the two strategies which translators generally adopt for explicitation of the source text.