Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

Culture-specific aspects in the Qur{u2019}an are a major obstacle for any translator who translates the Qur{u2019}an. These aspects include vocabulary, images and poetic features that are deeply rooted in the Arabic and Islamic culture and may or may not have their counterparts in other cultures. The objective of this research is to study rendering culture-specific aspects in selected translations of the Qur{u2019}an. Therefore, this thesis attempts to answer the following queries: What are the problems encountered by the translators of the Qur{u2019}an in rendering the culturespecific aspects? What are the strategies they use in order to overcome these problems? Are these strategies foreignizing or domesticating? Can the translators of the Qur{u2019}an imitate its poetic features? How far can this affect the translation in terms of loss, gain or even distortion? To reach the answers to the questions above in this thesis, the study will use the cultural approach since the cultural approach highlights the importance of the cultural context to translation. The selected translations are as follows: (1) The Koran Translated from the Arabic by J. M. Rodwell (1861), (2) The Message of the Qur{u2019}an by Muhammad Asad (1980), (3) THE QURAN: The First Poetic Translation by Fazlollah Nikayin (2000), (4) The Qur{u2019}an: A New Translation by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (2005) and (5) Meaning of the Holy Qur{u2019}an by Ahmad Hamid and Mohamed Hamed (2011). For this purpose, samples from these translations are analyzed to see how culture-specific aspects are rendered in three aspects: vocabulary, imagery and phonological features

Issued also as CD