Qur'an Translation

Discourse, Texture and Exegesis

Hussein Abdul-Raof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136115547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Qur'an is read by millions of Muslims on a daily basis, yet there is no book available to the reader, Arab or non-Arab, which provides a linguistic and rhetorical insight into Qur'anic discourse. This book explains Qur'an translational problems and provides a thorough account of the unique syntactic, semantic, phonetic, prosodic, pragmatic, and rhetorical features of the Qur'an.

CHAPTER ONE

Translating the Qur’an

1.1 The Mirage Concept of Equivalence

There has been no unanimous agreement among translation theorists as to what the concept of equivalence in translation means. This notion has always been used in a fuzzy sense; there has been even a call to abandon the term but “no other useful term has been offered in its place” (Neubert and Shreve 1992:143). For Gatford (1965:20), it is the replacement of textual material in one language (source language) by equivalent textual material in another language (target language). Snell-Hornby (1995:19) rightly claims that Gatford’s concept of equivalence is more general and abstract, a circular definition which leads nowhere. Catford’s definition, however, cannot be validated for languages like Arabic and European languages which are both linguistically and culturally incongruous. This is, therefore, a flawed definition since it presupposes that all languages are symmetrical. As for Newmark (1982:x), the concept of translation equivalence is “a dead duck — either too theoretical or too arbitrary”. Snell-Hornby (1995:22) takes a similar view that equivalence is unsuitable as a basic concept in translation theory: the term equivalence, apart from being imprecise and ill-defined (even after a heated debate of over twenty years) presents an illusion of symmetry between languages which hardly exists beyond the level of vague approximation and which distorts the basic problems of translation.

While Nida (1964) talks of formal and dynamic equivalence, Hatim and Mason (1990:8) warn the translator of the obvious problem concerning the use of the term ‘equivalence’ in connection with translation and that complete equivalence is not an achievable goal since there is no such thing as a formally or dynamically equivalent target language version of a source language text. They, instead, opt for the relative sense of the term which is the closest possible approximation to the source text meaning.

The notion of ‘approximation’ has now become the dominant criterion in translation studies; it is approximation rather than equivalence which the translator should be seeking to achieve because “there are no such things as identical equivalents” (Belloc 1931a&b, cf. Nida 1964:157). Scholars have become more aware of the fact that what exists among languages is in fact some degree of approximation because “skewing can never be absolutely eliminated” (Smalley 1991:3). This has also led Newmark (1991:101) to confirm that since the concept of an ideal or perfect translation is illusory, the concept of translation equivalence can only be an approximation. Although House (1981:204–5) encourages us to adopt a covert translation strategy in order to achieve functional equivalence, she admits that such an equivalence is difficult to achieve because differences of the socio-cultural norms and cultural presuppositions in the two languages have to be taken into account.

A similar note of warning is expressed by Baker (1992:6) who draws our attention to the fact that although equivalence can usually be obtained to some extent, it is influenced by a variety of linguistic and cultural factors and is therefore always relative. On the same line, Simms (1997:6) stresses that interlingual translation is impossible in a pure form, since just as there is no such thing as pure synonymy within a language, there is no such thing as pure lexical equivalence between languages. Larson (1984:153) also refers to the fact that since the receptor language is spoken by people of a culture which is often very different from the culture of those who speak the source language, this will automatically make it difficult to find lexical equivalents. Often the source language words will be translated by a completely different set of words. That is, the translator must not expect that there will be a literal equivalence (ibid: 154).

The controversy surrounding the notion of equivalence has moved from the micro-level, i.e., word level, of language to the macro-level, i.e., text level. Hatim (1997:4) now provides a different view; translation equivalence, for him, can be adequately established only in terms of criteria related to text type membership, and in the light of how these criteria inform the kind of compositional plan (structure) and the way a text is made internally cohesive (texture). Similarly, Neubert and Shreve (1992:143) also talk of the re-configuration of the source text’s textuality to produce a target textuality.

Equivalence, for Koller (1995:196), is a relative concept in several respects: it is determined on the one hand by the historical-cultural conditions under which texts are produced and received in the target culture, and on the other by a range of sometimes contradictory and scarcely reconcilable linguistic-textual and extra-linguistic factors and conditions; Koller (ibid) provides a long list of these factors and conditions; among them are: the source text with its linguistic, stylistic and aesthetic properties in the context of the linguistic, stylistic and aesthetic norms of the source language; also, linguistic, stylistic and aesthetic norms of the target language and of the translator.

For Vinay and Darbelnet (1958:46, 1995:31), equivalence refers to one of seven translation procedures. It is a kind of OBLIQUE translation, which means that it does not rely on the use of parallel categories existing in source language and target language. Equivalence for them is a procedure which “replicates the same situation as in the original, whilst using completely different wording” (1995:...