Abstract
The Holy Qur’an has features that are difficult for translators to transfer into another language, and they face problems in conveying the different shades of meaning of the verses. From a wide variety of these problems is synonymy. Synonymy refers to words that mean the same or show semantic resemblance to one another. This study examines the translation of two root-sharing synonymous Arabic words, namely استطاع and اسطاع in five well-known English translations. These include Pickthall (1930), Ali (1982), Arberry (1996), Abdel Haleem (2004), and Al-Hilali and Khan (2018). These translations are selected because they are popular in the Muslim World in addition to the fact that the translators belong to different linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds. The analysis shows that the translators were inconsistent in their selections of the English equivalents for the words under study. Furthermore, they did not convey the slight differences between the words and translated them similarly and interchangeably. The study concludes that some Qur’anic words are untranslatable, and cannot be rendered into another language, and therefore, translators are recommended to include explanatory notes between brackets or as footnotes in order to acknowledge the non-Arab readers that repetition of the words was not haphazard but intended for specific purposes.
Highlights
Linguists do not have a good answer to the question of how to define the notion of what a word is, in a clear and consistent way, semanticists agree that words are the smallest meaningful units of speech that can stand by themselves
The study concludes that some Qur’anic words are untranslatable, and cannot be rendered into another language, and translators are recommended to include explanatory notes between brackets or as footnotes in order to acknowledge the non-Arab readers that repetition of the words was not haphazard but intended for specific purposes
This study aims to : 1) compare and contrast how the root-sharing near-synonyms استطاع/ اسطاعthat occurred within the same verse were rendered in five well-known English translations of the Qur’an, namely, Pickthall (1930), Ali (1982), Arberry (1996), Abdel Haleem (2004), and Al-Hilali and Khan (2018) in order to find out which is more properly translated
Summary
Linguists do not have a good answer to the question of how to define the notion of what a word is, in a clear and consistent way, semanticists agree that words are the smallest meaningful units of speech that can stand by themselves. Words connect forms to the appropriate objects or concepts in the world to establish their lexical meanings, and are stored in the human memory with information about pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on (Carroll, 1998). There are fundamental issues that lexical semanticists investigate among which are how to describe the meanings of words in the language, and how to account for the variation of meaning in different contexts (Paradis, 2012). These two areas are interconnected, since an adequate description of meaning must account for the contextual variation and how we interpret it
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