Strategies Adopted in Translating the Interrogative Illocutionary Acts in Surah As-Saffat in the Holy Qur’ān

Abstract

This study examines the strategies adopted in translating the interrogative speech act in Surah As-Saffat in the Holy Qur’ān in three selected English translations of the Holy Qur’ān meanings. It aims at investigating the syntactic and pragmatic translation strategies used by the three selected translators to render the illocutionary acts (pragmatic meanings) of Qur’ānic interrogations into English. The study data consist of 28 interrogations collected from the original Qur’ānic Arabic text of Surah As-Saffat along with their 84 corresponding English translations in the three selected English translations. Chesterman taxonomy (1997) for translation strategies has been adopted to examine the translation strategies used in the three selected English translations. Quantitative content analysis has been used to examine the collected data. The results showed that the three translators used different syntactic and pragmatic translation strategies to render the illocutionary acts of these Qur’ānic utterances. Of these strategies, the pragmatic strategy of ‘explicitness change’ used by the translators seems effective, in most cases, to convey the illocutionary acts of most of those Qur’ānic interrogations into English. Since most Qur’ānic interrogations seem to go beyond their basic meanings to indicate different pragmatic meanings, it is recommended that the Holy Qur’ān translators should first realize the illocutionary acts (pragmatic meanings) of such Qur’ānic interrogations. This would help them adopt appropriate translation strategies in rendering the intended meanings of such Qur’ānic utterances.