Translating islamic religious expressions: Problems and strategies

Abstract

This study is an attempt to investigate the problems that face the translator when translating Islamic religious expressions from Arabic into English. It also explicates the strategies that the translators used in dealing with such problems. The study is descriptive, comparative and evaluative and focuses on how Islamic expressions drawn from the Islamic Arabic book Bidāyat al-Hidāyahare translated by two different translators namely Muhammad Abul Quasem (1979) and Mashhad Al-Allaf (2010). Since the explored religious expressions are deeply rooted in their native culture and constitute a main part of the Arabic-Islamic identity, the findings of the study show that such expressions, in many cases, do not have equivalents in the target language and culture, and translating them into English is very problematic and pose a great challenge to the translator. The findings also reveal that meaning losses and distortions are the result of a host of reasons among which are the sensitivity and peculiarity of the religious expressions and the huge differences between Arabic and English.