A Comparative Study on Translatability of Topicalisation in English Translations of the Holy Quran

The present study attempted to scrutinize the problem of translating topicalisations in the Holy Quran, which is one of the subdivisions of syntactic patterns. As a frame- work, the researcher adopted to H.G. Widdowson s(1975) classification of literary devices, according to their syntactic, semantic, and phonetic features. Theresearcher tried to investigate the extent of translatability or untranslatability of such syntactic devices in thethree English renderings of the Holy Quran. The samples were randomly selected from Surah Taahaa, Al Baqarah, Al Buruj, Ya-sin, Hadid, and Al-Ahzaab from the original text and were analyzed with their three English renderings. These three translations were done by Muhammad H. Shakir (1985), Fazllolah Nikayin (2000), andArthur John Arberry (1955). The results have shown that in the most cases of the selected samples, the translators are not faithful renders of the original text in the scope of translation of the topicalisations. Accurate translationof the most tropicalized cases of the original text has been ignored by the translators

Keywords:

Comparative study , syntactic pattern , topicalisation , translatability , untranslatability