The Translation of Requests in the Holy Quran:A Contrastive Study between Arabic and English

For decades, translation studies have been confined by traditional studies like semantics and syntax. The emergence of pragmatics as a new discipline in the field of linguistics opened the doors widely to both linguists and translators to look at languages from a new dimension which is language in use. At that time the importance of translating the Holy Quran has increased as people become more interested in learning about other cultures and religions and the number of Muslims who speak other languages and want to understand the teachings of Islam is increasing. Any translation of the Quran therefore should resemble the original as intended. One theory to consider this is speech acts by Austin and Searle. This thesis therefore provides a descriptive, comparative and analytical study of the performance of the speech act of requesting in the translation of the Holy Quran. The study described both languages’ performance of requesting (imperative in particular), analyzed its functions in the translated texts and compared three translations for compatibility. The researcher finds out that although Arabic and English are distinct linguistically, the translators strive to keep the same style, form and the intended pragmatic functions as possible. They use different strategies such as addition, substitution and explanation in a way to convey a similar effect. They succeed in most of the cases but failed in others specially when facing cultural – bound concepts and words of multiple meanings. In such cases part of the meaning is lost.