TY - JOUR
T1 - Translating the sacred Agency in translating verb-noun alternation in the Qur'an
AU - Al-Sharafi, Abdul Gabbar
AU - Ahmad, Rizwan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (FIT) Revue Babel.
PY - 2022/5/24
Y1 - 2022/5/24
N2 - One of the contentious issues in religious translation since the legendary St. Jerome is the degree of the translator’s agency. The point of contention has been whether the translator can exercise agency and freedom in translating sacred texts or they should strictly adhere to the form and attend to what St. Jerome called the “mysterious syntax” of the sacred text. Using a stylistic approach ( Abdul-Raof 2001 and 2006 ; Abdel Haleem 1992 ), we address the issue of the translator’s agency in religious translation by examining the translations of a unique rhetorical feature, namely the verb-noun alternation, by seven key translators in Verses 59, 64, 69 and 72 of Chapter 56, Al-Wāqi‘ah . Despite the general assumption that religious translation is highly constrained and that the translators of this type of text have little freedom, the findings of this paper show that religious translators, in fact, do exercise agency in their translation, whether in the form of adapting the source text to the target text readers or in the form of reproducing the grammatical patterning of the source text for cultural or ideological reasons.
AB - One of the contentious issues in religious translation since the legendary St. Jerome is the degree of the translator’s agency. The point of contention has been whether the translator can exercise agency and freedom in translating sacred texts or they should strictly adhere to the form and attend to what St. Jerome called the “mysterious syntax” of the sacred text. Using a stylistic approach ( Abdul-Raof 2001 and 2006 ; Abdel Haleem 1992 ), we address the issue of the translator’s agency in religious translation by examining the translations of a unique rhetorical feature, namely the verb-noun alternation, by seven key translators in Verses 59, 64, 69 and 72 of Chapter 56, Al-Wāqi‘ah . Despite the general assumption that religious translation is highly constrained and that the translators of this type of text have little freedom, the findings of this paper show that religious translators, in fact, do exercise agency in their translation, whether in the form of adapting the source text to the target text readers or in the form of reproducing the grammatical patterning of the source text for cultural or ideological reasons.
KW - Arabic rhetoric
KW - Arabic stylistics
KW - Iltifat
KW - Qur'anic inimitability
KW - eloquence
KW - religious translation
KW - translator's agency
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U2 - 10.1075/babel.00273.sha
DO - 10.1075/babel.00273.sha
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85139197484
SN - 0521-9744
VL - 68
SP - 317
EP - 340
JO - Babel
JF - Babel
IS - 3
ER -