Problematicity of Translating Some Selected Arabic Qur'anic Collocations into English: Linguistic, Stylistic, and Cultural Perspectives

Abstract

Rendering the Arabic Qur'anic collocations into English has always been a burdensome and daunting job. It is ever more problematic than the rendition of any genre. The recent research is a caveat-lector attempt that seeks specifically to investigate the problematicity of translating some selected Qur'anic collocations into English that is from linguistic, stylistic, and cultural perspectives. The findings of the study show some of the selected translations flop to transfer the connotative meaning of Qur'anic collocations scrupulously, and hence they have weak connotations. On the other hand, some renderings succeed in conveying the implicative meaning of Arabic Qur'anic collocations, and consequently, they have strong connotations. The results also reveal that the most generally put to use translation method or strategy for translating the embedded meaning of Arabic Qur'anic collocations was that of verbatim translation or literal translation, and they also demonstrate that this resulted in a great loss of the intentional meaning, distorting the perfect translation of Qur'anic collocations that is from linguistic, stylistic, and cultural perspectives.