In line with our discussion concerning the issue of equivalence Peter Newmark (1988b) accentuates the role played by semiotics- the science of signs- and refers to C. S. Peirce (1934) as its founder, pointing out:
C. S. Peirce (1934) stressed the communicative factor of any sign: the meaning of a sign consists of all the effects that may conceivably have practical bearings on a particular interpretant, and which will vary in accordance with the interpretant’- no sign, therefore, has a self-contained meaning.”
He further goes on to give an example of an iced lolly, to demonstrate what Peirce says. According to him an iced lolly may mean ‘a flavoured frozen confection on a stick’ but to a manufacturer it means ‘a profitable source of income’, to a housewife a ‘messy nuisance for which she gets a demand all the year round’, to a child ‘a satisfying cold drink on a stick which lasts a long time.’ He (ibid) continues that based on the role taken by the reader, i.e. manufacturer, housewife, or a child, the term will come to have different meanings.
This reminds one of the Quine’s theory of the indeterminacy of meaning, according to which meaning is not something determinate and absolute.
Regarding the Miraculous Qur’an, there is no doubt that Qur’anic terms, in most cases, find no one-to-one equivalents in English. Moreover, terms used as equivalents in English for the Qur’anic terms seem to possess a semantic filed different from that of their counterparts in the Qur’an. On the other hand neither “Pragmatic equivalence, which is ‘content-focused’ or ‘meaning-based’, and target language oriented nor formal equivalence which is ‘form-focused’, or ‘form-based’ and source language oriented”, as Manafi (2003: 34) points out, alone can be successful in achieving an adequate and precise equivalence:
Neither the content-focused equivalence nor the form-focused one alone can precisely and adequately reproduce both the content and the style of the Word of Allah in another language, and as such one should try to create a type of equivalence in which both the content and the style of the original are reproduced as much as possible.
The main sources of loss in any translation, according to Newmark (1988a:7-8), seems to be coming from factors like 1) peculiarity of elements of a text which are specific of its natural environment, institutions, and culture, 2) difference in ‘basic character (langue) and social varieties (parole) of languages, 3) individual use of language and attaching ‘private’ meaning to words, and finally 4) different theories of meaning that the translator and the text writer have.
۲٫۶ Nature of the Qur’an; Challenges, Losses & Gains
Generally, well-written texts are difficult to render into a foreign language mainly because they exploit as much of the ‘resources of a language’ as possible. If a text is well written, […] its formal components are of prime importance, and the translator must respect them and fully account for them in his version (Newmark, 1988a:127, 21). Religious texts normally have their share of resources and, thus, pose their complication in rendering. Haqani (1386: 69, as cited in Nejadhaqiqi, 2009/1388:35), holds the view:
Translation of religious texts, for their significance in transferring Divine Revelation and Word, in comparison with other texts, is more sensitive; as, on the one hand, the translator has no permission whatsoever to manipulate the content, and on the other hand, the holiness of the text prevents any distortion in its linguistic structure (my translation).
A religious text like the Qur’an has its own specific complications. In line with the discussion, one can rightly claim that the Glorious Qur’an is a paragon of resourcefulness which makes it difficult to render. The Qur’an is revealed in the ultimate form of beauty, conciseness and profoundness. To these qualities should be added hindering features like remoteness in time, cultural distance, metaphorical usage of language, cohesion, and coherence of the Book. Mainly because of these qualities Robinson (1996: 2, as cited by Abdul-Raof, 2001: 180) confirms that “much is lost when the Qur’an is encountered in translation.” Thus, the text becomes translation-resistant. In fact the greater the literary quality of the original message, the greater the degree of distortion and loss, for literary quality normally implies the fullest possible exploitation of the genius of the source language structure (Nida, 1975:91).
Loss, of any type, is a natural phenomenon in case of Qur’an translation. Thus, “Qur’an translations suffer from loss of rhetorical effect […] overtranslation, […] loss of form, and change of word order” (Abdul-Raof, 2001: 44).
۲٫۶٫۱ Qur’anic Form & Meaning; Loss and Gain
The divinity of the textual meaning and the subtle features of the form of the Qur’an are among the obstacles of translating it. As a result when a translator attempts the task, his product represents a work which has removed the divinity and gained humanly characteristics, the language that he constructs does not hold in its heart that beauty and subtlety and profoundness, his work suffers from overtranslation and distorts semantically-motivated word orders. Though it is natural that when a text is “ripped off its natural setting and transplanted to a foreign cultural setting is bound to suffer some kind of loss whether on the textual level or the semantic level” (Abdul-Raof, 2001: 110), the degree and the enormity of loss, one can say, should be taken into consideration.
Generally speaking, holy texts differ from other texts in their divinity, subtle makeup, eloquence, rhetoric, and deep meaning. Religious language, in Nida’s idea (1964:46) “is usually marked by incomprehensibility and mystery. If religious concepts could be explained, they would cease to be religion.” The incomprehensibility referred to by Nida may not be true about the Qur’an, though it may appear at first sight mysterious. The deep meaning in religious texts begs much thinking than normal. Rezayi Baq Bidi (2005/1384: 37, as cited in Nejadhaqiqi, 2009/1388: 98) asserts the rich eloquence and rhetoric of religious text, while highlighting their inspirational origin:
What makes translating holy books difficult, on the one hand, is their eloquence and rhetoric, and on the other hand, the belief that they are revealed and inspired (my translation).
The major problem causing barriers to the translator in approaching the Holy Message, as Manafi (2003: 39) argues, are of two types: ‘theological and Linguistic’. The theological problem refers to the divinity present in the text. The Word of Allah when rendered by a human gains humanly features and loses its divinity. On the other hand the linguistic problem refers to the fact that the Holy Qur’an is threaded in a text and language which is brief in words but rich in ideas, meanings and concepts.
As Manafi puts it in the above statement, the Qur’an, when rendered into a language acquires humanly characteristics. Smalley’s idea (1991: 92, as cited in Abdul-Raof, 2001: 47), that there is no such thing as “divinely inspired” translation can further consolidate Manafi’s viewpoint. This seems to be the reason why Shiite religious scholars believe that the laws observed by Muslims regarding the Qur’an are not necessary to be observed regarding the translations of the Book. For example a person can touch the Ayahs of the Qur’an without having ablution, while the same person is not allowed to touch the Qur’an’s Ayahs without ablution, or when the Qur’an is recited a Muslim should keep quiet, this is while when an English translation of the book is recited it is not deemed necessary to keep the silence. This is mainly because, in the view of Muslim scholars no translation is regarded as the Qur’an, but rather a mere tool for understanding the Glorious Book.
It is inte
resting to know that although the Holy Qur’an is revealed in Arabic, and that there are two types of Arabic, the senses in Qur’anic Arabic are particular of itself and any attempt to transfer those meanings into non-Qur’anic Arabic is meant to fail. Mehanna (1978, as cited by Mustafa, 2009) contends this fact:
The Book has senses that are exclusive to Quranic Arabic, so that attempting to render such senses even in non-Quranic Arabic is doomed to failure.
When even Arabic is unable to fully capture all the senses, how a language as remote as English can be successful in preventing the loss in translation? Ahmadi (1380: 503, as cited in Nejadhaqiqi, 2009/1388: 98), draws our attention to the same fact espoused by some Islamic scholars and tells us how difficult it is to capture in a different language the senses which are hidden in different layers in the Qur’an:
Some believe that, like three levels of heaven, i.e. supreme, middle, and lower, there are three layers of interpretation of Divine Book; Heavenly, Spiritual, and Natural meaning. Natural meaning is the apparent (exoteric) meaning of the text (that we call the literary meaning of the text), spiritual meaning refers to the inner (esoteric) meaning of the text which is difficult but possible to understand, and the divine meaning is the meaning behind the inner meaning and which is impossible for us, the mortal beings, to perceive (my translation).
Nida (1964: 101) alludes to multi-layered quality of literary works and states that “many literary works have more than one level of meaning, usually one overt level and one or more covert levels.”
Elsewhere Nida (1991:89) again refers to important texts and believes that in most of them, “especially those regarded as having ‘literal quality’, there is usually more than one level of meaning.”
In a previous work Nida (1964:117) regards highly poetic type of language having ‘many non-literal meanings.’
Newmark (1988a:51) holds the idea that “meaning is complicated, many-levelled,” and as “a ‘network of relations’ as devious as the channels of thought in the brain.”
Now that it is clear that generally texts have more than one layer of meaning, and specifically speaking, the Qur’an has senses particular to itself, it has different layers of meaning. Therefore, how can we expect a translator to fathom to the bottom of these meanings? How is it possible for him to protect himself against misunderstanding? Can he render them without loss? No is what Al-Hilali and Muhsin Khan (1996: 3, as cited in Mohaqeq, 2004: 13), presumably imply when they claim:
The translation of the meaning of the Glorious Quran, however accurate it may be, must fall short of conveying the wealth of meaning that the miraculous text of the original conveys; and that the meaning conveyed by translation is only the sum total of what the translator has understood from the text of the Glorious Book of Allah, and that it cannot escape the defects and drawbacks that are inherited in every human endeavor.
Ibrahim Anis (1371: 101, as cited in Mansouri 2004/1383: 60) further advocates the taxing task of understanding the meaning of words in the Qur’an:
Understanding the meaning behind the words of the Qur’an is a very difficult task and the translator cannot be safe from misunderstanding, thus s/he is not able to put into words what the Ayahs, phrases, and words of this Great Book contain in themselves (my translation).
When one considers the defects and shortcomings of rendering a literary masterpiece like the Qur’an, one comes to understand Henry de Forest Smith (Brower, 1959:773, as cited in Nida, 1964:1) when he said “a translation of a literary work is as tasteless as a stewed strawberry.”
Similarly Max Eastman (1936, as cited in Nida, 1964:1) contends that “almost all translations are bad.”
To compound the problem, words, especially Attributes of God, are quite context-sensitive. Thus a person who shoulders the responsibility of rendering must pay particular attention to them. A word combination like واسع علیم in the Qur’an, as proposed by Saffarzadeh (2009:1205) displays a context-sensitive word combination. According to Saffarzadeh (ibid) Attributes of God should be translated according to the context, “and particularly when they appear as twins, the task of the translators doubles.” Consequently, semantic features covered by the above double Attribute is different in different contexts. As she (ibid) discusses, this Attribute comes to have meaning which approximates “the Knowing Dominion-Expander”, when the Ayah talks about the “Vastness of Allah’s ownership of the Earth” (Q 2:115), but “the Knowing Bounty-Increaser” when the Ayah deals with “those who spend for Allah’s sake in charity” (Q 2:261), and ‘the Knowing Power-Bestower’ when the Ayah talks about “Talut against those who argue about his lack of merits to be a king, due to lack of wealth.”
The above example, demonstrates one of the numerous semantic problems which a translator faces in his task. Semantic problems of translation, according to Terrier’s theory, fall under three categories:
Firstly, the presence of a semantic field in one language does not imply its presence in the other one; secondly, semantic fields in languages do not coincide; thirdly, even if we accept that they coincide they are not covered with the same number of words. (Faroughi & Nazari, 2009: 1).
Thus, translations, normally and naturally, must be longer than STs.
Linguistic divergences underlie translation problems. The fact that languages categorize facts and experiences in quite different ways complicates the task of translation. Nida (1964: 2) maintains that what underlies the complications of translation is the “fundamental fact that languages differ radically from one another.” He insists that they are so different that, in the view of some it is not possible to communicate adequately in one language what has been said in another one (ibid).
This radical difference among languages, has made Adab (1996: 32, as cited by Abdul-Raof, 2001: 13) to declare that “The translator will have to accept a certain degree of loss of these features [intelligibility, acceptability, informativity], in that the very process of translation will incur such a loss by virtue of the inability within the target language to recreate the same lexical effect without subsequent loss of the message.”
Therefore, it seems that in any transfer of a message “there is an inevitable modification in the meaning, generally associated with some degree of loss, especially in the degree of impact of the original communication” (Nida, 1975: 91).
So far, it has been made clear that the deficiencies observed in translating the Qur’an are mainly due to a number of factors. The first factor is the source text which holds in itself highly compact forms and profound meanings, and divinity. The second factor is the inability of translators to fully fathom the Text, which is however, under the direct influence of the ST qualities. And third factor is the target language, which is, as discussed, quite different from Qur’anic Arabic. Therefore English renderings of Qur’anic Ayahs in which words are densely packed together are not sufficiently able to preserve densely packed meanings. A single Qur’anic word can cover a semantic field in the ST that is not translatable via a one-to-one equivalent TT term.
To the above difficulty should be added the semantically-motivated form of the Glorious Qur’an. According to Abdul-Raof (2001: 41) Morphological form is both semantically and stylistically motivated. Salmasizadeh (1990/1369: 165) says that it is impossible to find even a single redundant word or pointing in the Divine Message:
As in the genetic system where every creature is created to serve a special purpose, in the Qur’an too every word is revealed to carry its own certain meaning, in a way that if that particular word is taken aw
ay, it will inflict weakness and unintelligibility upon the text, or if another word is intended to take place of any Qur’anic word, that would be impossible for the replaced word to fit the intended Quranic meaning and this is one of the most important secrets of Qur’anic miracles (my translation).
Najafi, Asadpour, and Yazdani (2009: 53) believe that “Arabic texts, especially the Qur’an, are interwoven” (my translation).
To have a clearer picture of how meaning and form are beautifully and meticulously threaded into each other, we will have a look at the examples provided by Mansouri (2004/1383: 59). He brings forward two examples from the Holy Qur’an. The first example is Islam’s motto (لا اله الا الله) in which, according to him, there are seven syllables and the phrase has no stop consonant [.] Except the fricative /h/ all the consisting phonemes are vowels or vowel-like /L/ sound [.] In this very beautiful and profound motto there are only two consonants and of course there are many other characteristics in it (ibid, my translation).
Yet in another beautiful example, Mansouri (ibid) refers to Surah Anbia Ayah 33: (کُلٌّ فِی فَلَک‏). In this, as he points out, “the consonants /ک، ل، ف، ف، ل، ک/ /k, l, f, f, l, k/ are arranged in [such] a [meticulous] way that if read from beginning or end, it would be the same. As a result, there are features in the form of the Holy Qur’an which are not only difficult to transfer but also difficult to decipher (ibid, my translation).
English language is not able to capture the formal and semantic beauty of expressions like these. Meaning or form? Well, the general tendency is towards meaning, especially in a prose text, this is while in a poetic text, form seems to be carrying equal signification. Any translator attempting to translate the Qur’an is under a ‘constant pressure from the conflict between form and meaning’ (Nida, 1964: 2).
As a result, if the form of the message carries equal significance and is ‘highly specialized’ the “conflict between the dictates of form and content becomes especially important” (ibid: 25).
To make the matters worse, if “he attempts to approximate the stylistic qualities of the original, he is likely to sacrifice much of the meaning, while strict adherence to the literal content usually results in considerable loss of the stylistic flavour” (ibid:2). And this is a real dilemma, the ‘letter vs. the spirit’. Nida (ibid: 157) believes that only rarely can one produce both form and content in a translation.
Already speaking of Qur’anic language, we need to keep in mind that the Arabic of the Qur’an is stylistically and linguistically different from non-Qur’anic Arabic. Qur’anic Arabic is not solely a prose text but a ‘confusion of prose and poetry’. Phonetic and prosodic features give the Message a special characteristics.
Professor A. Guillaume, (as quoted by Arberry in Salmasizadeh, 1990/1369: 47) believes that “the Qur’an, with its special beautiful symphony, has a melodious sound agreeable to ear” (my translation).
This melody and other poetic aspects of the Qur’an apparently make Arberry to call the text of the Holy Book not solely a prose but ‘a fusion of prose and poetry.’ But it is important to know what sort of nature it has and what challenges it represents. Robert Frost’s famous statement on poetry as “that which is lost in translation” tells us how tricky a poem can be, and to what extent it is translatable.
To perceive the enormity of the task that a translator has regarding the Holy Qur’an, let’s have a look at David Connolly’s account on poetry:
[Poetry] represents writing in its most compact, condensed and heightened form, in which the language is predominantly connotational rather than denotational and in which content and form are inseparably linked. Poetry is also informed by a “musical mode” (Raffle, 1991: 95) or inner rhythm, regardless of whether there is any formal metre or rhyming pattern, which is one of the most elusive yet essential characteristics of the work that the translator is called upon to translate. (D. Connolly 1998/2001: 171).
Nida (1964:138) talks of the formal features of the order, imposed limitations of the rhythmical patterns, rare combinations of words, and unusual themes as the essence of poetry, which by themselves increase the communication load.
Mukarovsky (as cited in Nida, 1964: 177) says that “poetic language is the systematic violation of the language norm.”
Newmark (1988a:141) refers to the aesthetic function of language which is the essential part of poetry.
Regarding the intrinsic problems and the intricacies latent in poetry Jakobson (ibid: 117-118) maintains that:
In poetry, verbal equations become a constructive principle of the text. Syntactic and morphological categories, roots, and affixes, phonemes and their components (distinctive features)- in short, any constituents of the verbal code- are confronted, juxtaposed, brought into contiguous relation according to the principle of similarity and contrast and carry their own autonomous signification. Phonemic similarity is sensed as semantic relationship. The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps a more precise term- paronomasia, reigns over poetic art.
This significance of sound is also accepted by Newmark (1993:64) “sound has meaning, not only in poetry and rhetoric, but in all emotional expression.”
“The poetic or aesthetic function is centered in the sound effect of language, including metre, repetition and euphony” (Newmark, 1988a:141)
Fritz Senn (as cited in Newmark, 1993:68) agrees that sound, word order, repetition, grammatical structure […] ‘contribute to the sense.’
Although sound effect is an important element in a text like the Qur’an, ‘there is little possibility of reproducing sound effects,’ as languages differ in their sound systems and the values that each one attaches to a sound (Nida, 1964:176).
Reynold Nicklson (as cited in Salmasizadeh, 1990/1369:42) believes that the Qur’an […] when translated, much of its points and publicizing force is lost [.] Qur’anic rhythm is so subtle and delicate that like listening to music, everybody enjoys it […] this very sweet melody of the Qur’an gives life to it and makes it appear inimitable (my translation).
Roman Jakobson (1959:238, as quoted by Connolly 1998/2001) believes in the untranslatability of poetry.
The poetic feature of the Qur’an, if not more, is not less effective than its sublime meaning. It would be enough to quote Pickthall’s beautiful sentence regarding this quality in which he said “that inimitable symphony, the very sound of which move men to tears and ecstasy.” Thus, the symphony of the Message is as important as the meaning and is worthy of paying attention. As talked before the form and the stylistic features of the Qur’an are not there without a reason. They contribute to the overall meaning of the Text. Phonetic and prosodic features such as assimilation, nasalization, and lengthening are employed for aesthetic as well as communicative effect […]. (Abdul-Raof, 2001: 93). Unfortunately prosodic and other phonetic features are the first casualty in translation and thus, lost. (Abdul-Raof, ibid: 41)
Now with all these features, Robert frost (as cited in Newmark, ibid), one will assume, was right when he said “the poetry is the untranslatable element.”