Article published In:
BabelVol. 68:3 (2022) ► pp.317–340
Translating the sacred
Agency in translating verb-noun alternation in the Qur’an
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.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Inimitability of the Qur’an
- Stylistic inimitability
- Verses under study
- Translating the sacred
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgement
- Note
-
References
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