Transference of regular exclamatives in the glorious Qur'an into English

Abstract EN

Abdelwali (2007 : 1-2) states that “the Holy Qur'an is artistically constructed and strongly rhetorical in comparison with ordinary prose.

The versatility of the Qur'anic lexemes and style were not captured in most of the English versions of the Qur'an”.

Thus, the transference of the glorious Qur'an “is an extremely difficult endeavour because each translator must consult his / her opinion and aesthetic sense in trying to replicate shades of meaning in another language”.

The present paper explores the transference of regular exclamatives in the Glorious Qur'an.

It examines the methods the translators adopt in choosing equivalents and evaluates their translations in terms of meaning and effect.

Seven translations are analysed and evaluated.

The main conclusion the paper arrives at is that most translators tend to preserve the original contextual meaning at the expense of the original effect.

Since the language of Holy Qur'an is miraculous and, thus, difficult to translate, translators are reluctant to change the propositional content of the original exclamatives.

They, sometimes, tend to be literal in order to preserve the original structure.

Moreover, five criteria are identified concerning the choice of an appropriate equivalent for a Qura'nic exclamative, namely, the context and co-text of use, the existence of more than one interpretation for one verse, the structure of the original exclamative, the propositional content of the exclamative and overtranslation and undertranslation.