The Translation of God's Names in the Quran: A Descriptive Study

This thesis explores the translation of God’s names in the Quran. It centres around many of the common issues that the translators of divine attributes face. Since these are sensitive cultural items, translators should ideally give special treatment to divine designations. God’s names are not just stock names but rather they are nominalized adjectives with a descriptive content. As such divine names can enter into a variety of semantic relations such as synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy and hyperonymy (also termed ‘hypernymy’ and ‘superordinateness’). Divine names’ highly-nuanced semantic, syntactic and morphological makeup means that they require delicate treatment on the part of translators. Quran translators realize that God’s names are culture-bound terms and employ different techniques to give faithful renditions. Often they make use of an amalgamation of strategies to accurately reflect their meaning(s) and offset any loss thereof. By and large, literal translation seems to take a rather safe precedence over any other strategy, which gives a safeguard against any misrepresentation of divine attributes. Sometimes the presence of recognized or cultural equivalents is a sufficient warrant to depart from literal matches. This thesis shows how selected Quran translators exhibit varying degrees of consistency in their renditions of divine names, which may be attributable to the absence of hard-and-fast rules for the interlingual transfer of culturally laden lexemes. A convoluted issue that Quran translators face is how to tackle near-synonymous expressions. The situation is aggravated when they deal with divine names where near-synonymy exists in abundance. Quite often, the selected translators in this study have not been able to successfully replicate the more pronounced differences between near-synonymous divine names. Finding matchable polysemous items between languages is a familiar quandary that interpreters have to grapple with. Data in this study demonstrates how it is a taxing task trying to find a single item in English that bears the īe range of senses that a polysemous divine name has. Quran translators are often confronted with the task of picking up a single sense out of the multiple senses that the divine name can designate; the onus in such a pursuit is typically on the Quran exegeses. Usually, the primary (or literal) sense is the translators’ first port of call to the exclusion of any other secondary sense. It is uncommon to find a translator who is keen on conveying the semantic polyvalence of God’s appelations. In this way, Quran translators, inadvertently, do not do justice to the richness of the Quran text despite many readers’ eagerness to become illuminated about the various meanings of their Sacred Book. It is perhaps translators’ proclivity for brevity that is the overriding factor that has stopped them in their tracks. It is reasonable to assume that the brushing aside of (intended) secondary meanings of divine names by many Quran translators to chase ‘structural fidelity’ has come at the expense of more accurate glosses.