Hapaxes in the Qurʾān: Semantic and Cultural Loss in the Translation of fatīl, naqīr and qiṭmīr | ||
| مجلة کلية الأداب - جامعة حلوان | ||
| Article 16, Volume 55, Issue 1, July 2022, Pages 1-23 PDF (963.1 K) | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/kgef.2022.299602 | ||
| Authors | ||
| أحمد علي1; محمد تغيان2 | ||
| 1قسم اللغة الإنجليزية - كلية الآداب - جامعة حلوان | ||
| 2قسم اللغة الإنجليزية- كلية الآداب- جامعة حلوان | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Despite the great attention, devoted by classical and modern Muslim exegetes, to various aspects of the Qurʾān, on both the micro-level, i.e., that of the word, and the macro-level, i.e., that of the verse or the sūra, little research has focused on hapax legomena or al-alfāẓ al-waḥīda, as one of the Qurʾān’s most salient features. As the term signifies, al-alfāẓ al-waḥīda are the words that occur in the Qurʾān only once, including but not limited to abb, ḍīza, masghaba, al-ṣamad, and others. Specifically, this paper examines the translation of three Qurʾānic words, namely fatīl, naqīr and qiṭmīr, which are basically found upon a date-stone, indicating a whit. These three quantitative words, with which the Arabs were already familiar, are culturally bound terms. To explain, they are idiomatically employed, as in fulān lā yamliku an-naqīr ’aw al-fatīl ’aw al-qiṭmīr, meaning so-and-so experiences want or need. This paper attempts to identify the causes of semantic and cultural loss inherent in rendering them into English, revisiting Baker's (1992) typology of non-equivalence at the word level, in particular, represented by culturally specific or semantically complex concepts in the source text and lack of lexicalization in the target language. Thus, the use of footnotes as a compensation strategy is highly recommended to reduce translation loss, semantically and culturally. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Hapax legomenon - semantic and cultural loss - the Qurʾān; translation - equivalence | ||
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