An Investigation Into the Strategies Applied for the Translation of Informative, Expressive, and Operative Aspects of the Holy Qur'ān Into English: Towards Functional Equivalence

The present study centered around the problem of functional equivalence in source-text-target-text pairs. In fact, this study was an attempt to investigate patterns of professional translators’ main approaches to the production of functionally equivalent Qur’ānic translations. The ultimate objective was to investigate the practicality of Reiss’s theoretical functionalist text-oriented model of translation. Hence, five selected English translations were descriptively and linguistically analyzed and compared with their corresponding Qur’ānic surahs. The analysis included content-specific and formal features of the texts to discover common and frequent translation strategies applied in the production of each target text. The descriptive findings were then calculated using frequency and percentage. The findings on the translations of the informative and expressive texts revealed that Reiss’s relevant prediction was right. However, in contrast to Reiss’s view, the operative text was mostly translated literally rather than adaptively by most of the translators.

Keywords:

Expressive texts , functional equivalence , informative texts , operative texts , the Qur’an , Translation Strategies