ABSTRACT
The translation of the Qur’ān involves numerous challenges owing to the meaning strata that are intrinsic to this Holy Writ. Some of those challenges are particularly sensitive when they are related to the physical attributes of Allah (God). This chapter focuses on the concepts HAND and FACE as attributed to Allah in a number of Qur’anic verses. The difficulties facing the translator in rendering such verses are multi-layered. From the religious point of view, different schools of thought have attempted to explain this issue in ways that do not contradict the Islamic ‘aqīda (creed) in that Allah is exalted above all human attributes (Ibn Taymiyah, 2004: Part 5). Therefore, any discussion regarding the interpretation, and translation, of the Qur’anic verses addressing physical references to the Divine needs to consider the lexical, pragmatic and cognitive aspects of those textual references. Following the framework of relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995), the concepts HAND and FACE are considered underspecified concepts in the ST (Source Text) which need to be inferentially worked out to the intended meaning, whether it is literal or metaphorical, and conveyed in the TT (Target Text). The chapter compares six of the widely used English translations of the Qur’ān in their rendering of these concepts. Due to the sensitivity of the issue, analysis shows that translators have generally been careful in their strategies. In the translation of the lexical word yadd encoding HAND, it is noted that all translators opted to render it with the same underspecified concept in the TT. This strategy might have been encouraged by the high correlation between the range of meanings the words yadd and hand can encode in Arabic and English. However, some variation has been noted in the translation of the word wajh encoding FACE. In a few cases, translators have chosen to semantically encode in the TT a concept that has been pragmatically inferred from the ST.
