The English Translation of Arabic Puns in the Holy Quran

ABSTRACT

The pun is a tricky use of a word or phrase which has very different meanings that are closely interrelated, or of words with the same sound but different meanings. The Pun is a term with a dual meaning: “close” using obvious reference, and “far” using obscure reference. The hidden is usually meant. The close meaning is the sooner that comes to the listener’s mind. However, the speaker targets at the far one yet use the close to hide it. Translating the Quran text always raises several serious challenges in translation; these challenges are due to the different translations of puns and the misinterpretations between the intended meanings of a pun with their basic concepts, which could result in a certain amount of ambiguity. The study examines the Quranic corpus and its three versions of English translations. The study utilizes the typology of Delabastita᾿s for horizontal puns, Nida’s techniques of dynamic and formal equivalent and Newmark’s translation methods. This research attempts to investigate the semantic meaning of puns in the Quran translation and to define the translation techniques applied in translating the Quranic puns from Arabic into English.

KEYWORDS:

• Sacred translation
• misunderstanding of pun
• Quran translation techniques
• typology of puns

Acknowledgments

We thank Prof. Jason Wrench, editor of the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research for his outstanding assistance in passing this paper to the public, also we extend our warm thanks and gratitude’s to the great anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.