Abstract
The Holy Qurʼān is the highest authority in Islam. It is the paramount source of the divine laws of the Islamic religion because the Qurʼān is the word from Allah intended for all times and all places. It is revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) via the archangel Gabriel. Accordingly, translating the Holy Qurʼān from the source tongue ‘Arabic' into other languages is accompanied by many linguistic challenges because there are no two languages are matching linguistically. Linguistic challenges arise when conveying the intended meaning accompanied by its semantic components of the Holy Qurʼān into another language.
This paper identifies some linguistic challenges of translating some Qurʼānic terms from Arabic as a source text (ST) into English as a target text (TT) to account for the different layers of linguistic analysis. It sheds light on a range of linguistic topics including four types of semantic and syntactic challenges such as: linguistic gaps, collocation, synonymy, componential features and polysemy. These linguistic challenges can be better investigated and illustrated through comparing three famous renditions by Sahih International's (1997), Pickthall's (1930) and Arberry's (1955) (1).
The main objective of this paper is to detect the main challenges which the three translators face during the process of translation, and to find out the solutions to those challenges. This paper seeks to answer only two questions:
1. What are the challenges when translating Qurʼānic terms from Arabic (ST) into English (TT)?
2. What are the suggestions to overcome these challenges?