Quran Translation No Easy Task: Iraqi Scholar
In an addressing to the opening ceremony of a conference on “Quran and Translation”, University of Basra professor Majid Abdul Hamid al-Kaabi said there have been many questions about rendering the Quran into other languages.
Is the Quran’s translation as sacred and valuable as the original text, and does one get the same Thawab (reward) for reading the translation as that for reciting the Quran itself are among those questions, he said.
According to the scholar, many studies have shown that translating the concepts of the Quran exactly into other languages is not possible.
The style of the Quran is a distinguished and unique one and that is what makes its translation difficult, he stated.
He noted that many of those who have rendered the Quran into other languages have admitted this, including Arthur John Arberry, a British scholar of Arabic literature, Persian studies, and Islamic studies, whose translation of the Quran in English was first published in 1955.
Elsewhere in his remarks, al-Kaabi stressed that in order to best convey the Quranic meanings in other languages, the translator should pay close attention to the Shaan Nuzul (the context in which a verse was revealed) as well as the rhetorical characteristics of the Arabic language.
The conference on Quran and Translation kicked off at the University of Qom, Iran, on Monday morning.
Seyed Mohammad Razi Mostafavinia, the scientific secretary of the conference told IQNA earlier that some 600 papers have been submitted to the secretariat, 213 of which were accepted.
He said they have been printed in 7 volumes and that the participants will receive a book containing the abstracts of the accepted papers at the conference.
Speakers at the conference will include scholars from the University of Qom and Shahid Beheshti University as well as six Iraqi scholars, he noted.
The scholarly event will discuss translations of the Quran into Persian and other languages in the past and in the contemporary era, Mostafavinia said.
Interdisciplinary approaches to translation of the Quran, Translatablility and untranslatablility of the Quran, challenges of translation at different linguistic levels of the Quran, methods and models of assessing Quran translations, and Quranic stories in translation are some of the topics discussed in the papers, he noted.
