Qur‘anic temporospatial allusive references in English translations on the basis of Leppihalme’s taxonomy

Abstract

The present study aimed at identifying strategies used by the English translators in rendering the allusive references of The Holy Qur’an, specifying their distribution, and revealing whether the general inclination of the translators was towards domesticating or foreignizing strategies. To this end, Leppihalme’s (1997) taxonomy, as the only model exclusively dealing with allusive references in literary texts, was selected as the model of the study. The data were extracted from 28 English translations of The Holy Qur’an. The paper exclusively concentrated on the temporospatial allusive references. Leppihalme’s model included the strategies of retention (with or without informative notes), replacement of the source-language name by another name (from either the source- or the target-language), and omission of the name. The findings revealed that all these three strategies were adopted by all translators. The strategy of replacement had the highest frequency (77.10%) while the strategy of omission was adopted only in rendering 1.00% percent of the names. Retention (by 21.90%) was found to be the second most frequent strategy adopted by English translators of Qur’anic allusive names. Additionally, it was found that 77.9% of the strategies inclined towards domestication, while only 22.10% showed tendency towards foreignization strategies.