Extended Metaphor in the Glorious Qur'an Through Translation
A Case Study
Abstract
The study aimed to investigate procedures employed in the translation of extended metaphors (EMs) as an under-researched structural feature in Qur’anic Arabic-English translation. To this end, Qur’anic verses illustrating the point were sampled and analyzed to discover the most and least applied procedures based on Newmark’s (1988) metaphor translation procedures. Accordingly, three Qur’an translations were analyzed in an attempt to determine the EMs and their figurative/intended meanings. To do so, the researchers investigated the procedures in 50 cases comprising EMs. This study demonstrated that EMs in the Qur’an, as structural features, posed challenges to the translators. The analysis revealed that the translators demanded great efforts to render EMs. Furthermore, not all the translations were fully communicative concerning intended meanings. The most frequent procedure for EM translation was ‘reproducing same images in the TL literally’ (75.4%) while the least frequent one was ‘translation of metaphor/simile by simile plus sense’ (0.5%). Confronted by a gap in the model, the researchers appended an additional procedure to the model’s existing categories, namely ‘explicating a part of metaphor/simile’, observing that the original model cannot cover some metaphorical occurrences addressed in a miraculous discourse, namely the Word of Allah, Jalla Jalaaluh.
Keywords:
extended metaphor, Newmark’s metaphor translation strategies, structural viewpoint, translation of the Holy Qur’anReferences
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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).
