Problems and Strategies in English Translation of Quranic Divine Names

Abstract

The present research was an attempt to see how Quranic Divine Names (DNs) were translated into English by three professional translators namely, Shakir (1985), Qarai (2003), and Nikayin (2006) who provided their translations in prose, phrase-by-phrase, and poetry forms respectively. Firstly, the problems which the translators met for attaining lexical adequacy and semantic equivalence were explored. Secondly, the type and extent of strategies adopted by these three translators for overcoming the problems were described. Finally, the translators` works were compared and implications drawn. The findings of the study showed that the lexical compression of the original DNs and their emotive overtones and effects caused the main body of problems for the translators. Furthermore, it was found out that the most frequent strategies adopted by Shakir and Qarai were ‘near-synonymy’ and ‘expansion’ respectively. Nikayin, however, used these two strategies almost to an equal extent as his most frequent strategies.