Translation of vocative style in the Glorious Qur'an into English

Abstract EN

The study investigates the style of vocatives in Arabic language with reference to the Glorious Qura'n and how it is realized (rendered) into English.

The vocative has been a rather neglected aspect of research as far as translation studies in Basrah are concerned.

Levinson(1987:71) describes vocatives as “ an interesting grammatical category, yet underexplored linguistic phenomenon.

Vocatives can be highly idiosyncratic and complex”.

Accordingly, the study of the role and characteristics of English vocative is important both in terms of its pragmatic functions and also from a sociolinguistic perspective.

This paper aims at describing and analyzing the function of vocative in both English and Arabic languages.

Besides, it makes a comparison between the two languages to show the similarities and differences between them.

For this sake, Newmark's model(1982:39) (semantics and communicative translation) is used to evaluate the translations.

Ten verses, with their exegerical interpretations are chosen from the Glorious Qur'an , are presented.

Seven translations for each verse are analysed , discussed and assessed in order to arrive at the methods the translator adopts in rendering the vocative style.

The conclusions of the study show that the meaning of Qura'nic vocative texts is not preserved as much as possible.

Besides, there are three criteria affecting the choice of a specific equivalent as far as the rendering of vocative into English is concerned .

The first criterion is the context of use of the vocative.

The second is the interpretation of the verse in which the vocative appears.

The third criterion is the structure of the original vocative and whether there is a relation between the form of vocative and the meaning it conveys.