Critique of the translation of Surah Yusuf based on the situational context of the source text from Michael Halliday's point of view (Case study: Saffarzadeh and Ghorab translation)

Surah Yusuf is one of the surahs of the Qur'an which has narrated the whole story of the Prophet Yusuf (pbuh) from the beginning to the end in a novel way. This surah was revealed at the end of the Meccan period when the pressure on the call to Islam reached its peak, and therefore, in a didactic way, it addressed the Prophet of Islam directly and all the believers indirectly. This paper attempts to examine the translation of parts of Surah Yusuf by using the theory of situational context in Halliday's systemic functional grammar and the need to pay attention to it in understanding the text and to find whether both translators were successfully translated the source text from Arabic to Farsi or not. Therefore, in the first step, we examine the elements of the Holliday situational context (field, mode and tenor) in the Arabic text of a part of the surah, then we point out the extent to which translators regard to this situational context in their translation. It seems that our translators in this article (Saffarzadeh and Ghorab) have paid less attention to this Arabic textual context, and have translated more by looking at the appearance of the text. Therefore, the reader of the Persian translation cannot be well aware of the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunction of the original language (Arabic) and the position of the actors in the story of Yusuf.

Keywords:

Holy Quran translation , Halliday's systemic functional grammar , Situational Context , Surah Yusuf , Saffarzadeh , Ghorab