Translation strategies for culture-specific Items in the Qur’an: a corpus-based descriptive study
This study investigates the strategies adopted for the translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) embedded in the Qur’an, the primary religious book of Islam revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in classical Arabic more than fourteen centuries ago. The Qur’an is one of the most translated texts throughout history, and its status as a divine text presents particular challenges for translation. One challenge that translators of the Qur’an face is that Qur’anic discourse is fully embedded in a particular context, with references to various cultural aspects such as religious beliefs, social customs, material elements, cultural places, historical figures, and ecology. Accordingly, the translation of these CSIs into English (or any other language), poses particular challenges for translators, given the barriers of language, time and space. This raises questions not only about the strategies that translators select for these items, but also the factors that may influence the choice of strategies.
Situated within the paradigm of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) (Toury, 2012), this study aims to: (1) uncover the position and the function of selected English translations of the Qur’an in their target language (TL) cultural system; (2) quantitatively determine the dominant translation strategies used in a selection of English translations for translating different categories of CSIs in the Qur’an; and (3) identify the extra- and intratextual factors that affect the choice of strategies for different categories of CSIs. To answer these questions, the study incorporates two principal methodological approaches, namely peritextual analysis of selected translations of the Qur’an (Genette, 1991, 1997), and quantitative corpus analysis (Zanettin, 2012). Embedded in the corpus-based analysis is also a secondary quantitative analysis based on a ranking questionnaire, used to validate the identification and classification of CSIs.
In brief, the study has found that Al-Hilali and Khan’s, Ghali’s and Irving’s translations of the Qur’an are strongly oriented towards the ST, since their peritextual materials evoke both the ST language and culture. There is also a strong ST orientation in the translations of Saheeh International, Pickthall, and Abdel Haleem, albeit serving different functions. Bewley and Bewley’s translation occupies a middle space between ST and target audience/culture orientation. The translation of Arberry is presented quite differently from all other translations in this study due to its emphasis on the Qur’an being more a literary and artistic product. The most target-oriented translation is that produced by Itani. In addition to this, the study found that cultural substitution and transference were the major strategies applied by the translators, indicating a certain degree of conflict between source-oriented and target-oriented strategies. Certain extra-textual and intra-textual factors, which may have influenced the selection of strategies in translating CSIs embedded in the Qur’an, were identified.
This study is the first to investigate translation strategies adopted for translating different categories of CSIs in the Qur’an using both quantitative and qualitative measures with reference to the conceptual and methodological approaches of DTS. The use of a questionnaire survey approach to compile the final list of CSIs in the Qur’an by expert translator respondents provides a more objective approach to the subjective methodologies that dominate this research area. The use of this methodology, along with the corpus-based methods, make a novel contribution to the area of study, both conceptually and methodologically.
