Translating Collocations in the Qur’an from Arabic into English: A Particular Reference to Surah Al-Fatiha

Abstract

Translation is a cultural communicative process, a cultural exchange between two different languages. In such a text conversion, the translator is the heart of the process since, as the moderator of two languages, the choices s/he makes are often (un)consciously influenced by various variables, such as his/her cultural identity or the state of his/her national identity. This paper contributes to the current body of knowledge in this area, focusing on Qur’anic collocations and approaching the collocational phenomenon in Qur’anic rhetoric from linguistic and cultural perspectives. Specifically, this study examined multiple translated versions of the collocations embedded within Surah Al-Fatiha. To operate the analysis, we employed the functional model of assessment (Zhang, 2018) in which four categories of cultural factors are presented: religion, customs, regions, and background. Broadly, the study concludes that: 1) the translators more often than not faced complications with respect to lexicality, and 2) the translators should have been significantly more cognizant of the nature of cultural and pragmatic collocations and appreciate better the gaps that exist between Arabic and English cultural concepts and beliefs.