In collaboration with Payame Noor University and Scientific Association of Quran and Testaments

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor in Department of English Language and Literature; Faculty Member of University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

Translating personal names in literary-religious texts is one the challenges faced by translators. The study aims at investigating strategies of translating such names in The Holy Qur’an based on Grima’s (2018) model. The research method is of descriptive type. The corpus includes five Persian translations by Makarem Shirazi, Elahi Qomshei, Fuladvand, Khoramshahi, and Ansarian, and five English translations by Qarib, Saewar, Rodwell, Sale, and Itani. As the first step, personal names were identified from The Holy Qur’an and their equivalents were extracted from the Persian and English translations. Finally, the strategies were specified based on the boosted framework. According to the findings, strategies of ‘transference’, ‘modification’, ‘transliteration’, and ‘combination’ were employed at least once while ‘omission’ had never been used and the strategy of ‘translation’ was not adopted independently. In fact, the addition of the two strategies of ‘transliteration’, and ‘combination’ was quite essential for boosting Grima’s (2018) model. Moreover, the findings of the present study revealed that ‘transference’ (by 96%) and ‘modification’ (by 71%) were the most repeatedly used strategies resorted by Persian and English translators, respectively. Moreover, it was found that 100% of the strategies adopted by Persian translators tended towards the source-language and culture, while 79% of the selected strategies by English translators inclined towards the target-language and culture.

Keywords

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