“Herbs or Stars.” A Brief Survey of some Translations of the Glorious Qur’an: The Case of Surat Ar-Rahman

Abstract

Writers from different countries, different religions and even different linguistic backgrounds have tried to understand the meaning of the Qur’an, then to translate it in different languages. Thus, this study is based on three translations of Surat Ar-Rahman written respectively by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Y), Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (P), and Muhammad Habib Shakir (S). The researcher has combined and twinned them to their transliterated equivalent verse. The translations are from the source language (Classical Arabic) to the target language (English). Obviously, there will be no syntactic or morphological analysis of these translations. It would apparently be a too great task for the author of this paper, since any Surah of the Qur’an would need centuries to explain all that unique, dignified figurative language enhanced with several anaphors. This paper, compared to others, is at an embryonic stage. The researcher will consider just some differences in the three translations which have puzzled her for years. Hence, she arrives to the conclusion that due to the richness and the Grandeur of the pragmatic meaning of the Glorious Qur’an, further research is needed to highlight some of the religious, cultural and linguistic differences between Languages.