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Article published In:
FORUM
Vol. 22:1 (2024) ► pp.1–25

Exploring normal vs. service translators’ orientation in rendering realia in The Holy Qur’an

| University of Isfahan
Realia has always been thought of as a great challenge for translators. The native language and cultural background of a translator can be a factor potentially affecting the selection of equivalents and translation procedures. This paper aims to explore whether being a normal or a service translator would have any effect on adopting source- or target-oriented translation procedures. ‘Service translators’ are those who translate into a foreign language, while ‘normal translators’ are those who translate into their mother language. In other words, normal translators should be target-language native translators. The corpus includes the realia extracted from The Holy Qur’an and its four English translations by two service translators (Abdel-Haleem 2005 and Starkovsky 2005) and two normal translators (Arberry 1955 and Abu Nasr 1985). The data were analyzed on the basis of Liang’s (2016) model. Findings revealed that the normal translators showed a slightly greater tendency (1%) towards source-oriented procedures than the service translators. On the other hand, target-oriented procedures adopted by the service translators exceeded those of the normal translators by 0.50%.
Keywords: The Holy Qur’an , normal translator, service translator, realia, source oriented procedures, target-oriented procedures
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Review of the literature
    • 2.1Translating religious texts
    • 2.2Realia as culture-bound concepts
    • 2.3Directionality of translation
    • 2.4Normal vs. service translators
    • 2.5Previous studies
      • 2.5.1Previous studies on cultural concepts
      • 2.5.2Previous studies on directionality
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2A model for data analysis
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Qualitative data
      • 4.1.1Discussion of qualitative data
      • 4.1.2Main summary of qualitative data
    • 4.2Quantitative data
      • 4.2.1Results of quantitative data
      • 4.2.2Main summary of quantitative data
      • 4.2.3Discussion of quantitative data
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 25 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.00033.afr
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