Translating autoantonymy in the Qur’an

Abstract

This study sets out to examine autoantonymy in translation as an under-researched linguistic phenomenon. Given the dearth of serious work on autoantonymy in English-Arabic translation studies, this paper explores the difficulties associated with translating Arabic autoantonymy into English, based on selected examples drawn from the Qur’an. With reference to a host of authoritative Qur’anic exegeses and three Qur’anic translations, it has been possible to provide a solid linguistic-translational groundwork, allowing for semantic verification of the autoantonymous aspects of the selected examples, and for a fine-grained analysis that reveals how much a translated autoantonymous construction differs from its source language counterpart. In this study, it is argued that sorting out the ubiquitous, inverse duplicity of meaning depends on certain contextual, linguistic-scriptural and social-cultural factors. The study also shows that the conceptual complexity of autoantonymy evidently manifests itself in the difficulties that translators have finding a suitable translation. The thrust of the analysis is to stress that the Qur’an-specific autoantonyms do not lend themselves to easy, simple and straightforward rendering. It also provides further evidence for the claim that total lexical equivalence between Arabic and English, especially in Qur’anic discourse, cannot be always achieved, which may, consequently, confuse and shackle translators.