The Cognate Accusative Construction in the Glorious Qur'an: A case of Translation Loss | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 9, Volume 59, Issue 1, July 2015, Page 281-306 PDF (685.96 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2015.106613 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Zakaria K. A. Alssiefy Alssiefy | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The cognate accusative construction (CAC, hereafter) is viewed by many as one of the most unique constructions in the Arabic language, in general, and in the Glorious Qur'an, in particular. This uniqueness arises from two major reasons: first, the CAC is regarded as one of the most elegant and expressive rhetorical devices in the Glorious Qur'an, second, it is a construction which involves considerable difficulties, as far as translation is concerned. The present research assumes that most translations of the Glorious Qur'an have displayed significant translation loss regarding the morpho-syntactic, semantic and phonological features of the CAC. It is also assumed that translating the CAC into English displays a challenging task to both orientalist and nativist translators, which reflects one of the most significant aspects of the inimitability / untranslatability of the Glorious Qur'an. This corpus-based research sought to investigate, by means of comparison, four distinguished English translations of the Glorious Qur'an aiming to reveal how far these translations have succeeded in producing satisfactory renditions of the CACs, and hence conveyed the intended messages. Findings of the research indicate that the rhythmic nature of the Arabic language and the idiosyncrasy of the CAC can be held responsible for the failure to provide appropriate English equivalents for the CACs at all levels; lexical, syntactic, semantic, and phonological, as the CAC involves two morphologically, semantically and phonologically related lexical items, namely the main verb and the cognate accusative (CA, hereafter) which are both derived from the same radicals. In addition, this concomitant meaning loss has been engendered by a number of factors including the wide discrepancy between Arabic and English, ambiguity and versatility of Arabic lexis, word order, language-specific structures, and finally culture-specific differences | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Cognate Accusative Construction - Glorious Qur'an - Translation Loss; Untranslatability | ||||
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