Equivalent Patterns? A Phraseological Approach to Translating the Holy Qur'an

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of English - Faculty of Education - Ain Shams University

Abstract

This paper adopts the New-Firthian Sinclarian approach in shedding light on the translation of frequently occurring patterns in a specific genre (Hunston, 2011). The study takes a phraseological stance to investigate the possibility of using the same lexico-grammatical equivalent pattern all through the translated text. This will be done through examining some recurrent Arabic patterns in a parallel corpus of the Holy Qur’an and their seven English translations provided in corpus.quran.com (Dukes, 2015). The results and findings reveal that, though there are language-specific as well as culture-specific patterns concomitant with each genre, considering the phraseme as the core unit is a privilege. This is of interest to several domains of application, including lexicography, Arabic language learning and teaching, natural language processing, and translation.

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