Arabic-English translational crossover viewed from a linguistic/cultural perspective: with special reference to the major principles involved in translating the metaphorical language of the Quran

Abstract

This work deals with Arabic -English translational crossover viewed from a Linguistic /Cultural perspective, with special reference to the major principles involved in translating the metaphorical language of the Quran. It provides an analytical critique of the some selected English translations of the Original Quran. This research tries to demonstrate (1) whether the cultural convergence of English and Arabic, due to globalization, is leading, over time, to any further linguistic intermingling. This type of analysis is based chronologically on temporal constraints and, as a consequence, on whether they negatively or positively influence the quality of the final product of the translated text, and (2) whether the cultural backgrounds of translators, in terms of their native languages, religion and place of origin/residence have any influence on the quality of their translational works.Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, this study consists of seven other chapters. The first chapter is an introductory one, devoted to some controversial translational debates. It builds up a theoretical base, by reviewing thematically the available literature upon which translational strategies are established in order to clear the ground for the following chapters. It reviews the most relevant existing works, from the perspective of this study's topic, to highlight the gap that this work aims to fill.The second chapter discusses the differences between the two cultures concerned and the translation of the main features of culture. This chapter concentrates on cultural factors from an Arabic /English translational perspective, i.e. their impact on the rendition of cultural features such as the ecological, religious, social, political, and material aspects.Chapter three is concerned with the literal linguistic differences. More specifically, literal language will be looked at on a grammatical basis. Thus grammatical gaps between Arabic and English such as word order, number, gender and negation will be focused on.The fourth chapter will cover the figurative level of linguistic differences, as it is more cultural based. It will view the most important traditional tropes but will concentrate on the figures of speech that are most commonly used in the Quran and those that are stylistically useful and effective.Being the main focus of this study as well as due to its importance among other figurers of speech, metaphor will be dealt with separately in chapter five. It adopts the same approach in covering the figurative nature of metaphors.The analysis of chapter seven will be linguistically based on text patterns by examining and tracing chronologically the figurative language of the Quran through metaphorical discourse and to find out whether cultural convergence through temporal constraints has an effect on the way translators treat the Quran.Chapter eight focuses culturally on the profiles and cultural backgrounds of the translators of the Quran and their intentions in terms of whether they see the Quran as the word of God or whether they deal with it as a literary text and how this is reflected in their treatment of its metaphoric language