Translating the Prophetic Metaphor into English (with reference to An-Nawawi’s collection of forty Hadiths)

Abstract

One of the main challenges that translators encounter in the translation of religious texts is translating the Prophetic metaphor. The current study aims to investigate the challenges encountered by three well known translators, namely Ibrahim & Johnson-Davies (1999), Badi (2001), and Al-Munajjid (2017) in translating the Prophetic metaphors in An-Nawawi’s collection of forty Hadiths and to examine the strategies of translating them into English as well as to find out the most appropriate strategy in translating the Prophetic metaphors. Adopting Newmark’s (1988) metaphor translation strategies, three different English translations of ten examples of the Prophetic metaphors from An-Nawawi’s forty Hadiths are selected and analyzed using a qualitative – descriptive approach. Findings indicate that only two metaphor translation strategies are used, out of seven strategies proposed by Newmark (1988). The most dominant strategy used by the three selected translators is the first strategy of Newmark (1988), which is reproducing the same image of the source language (SL) metaphor in the target language (TL) whereas the least dominant strategy is Newmark’s (1988) fifth strategy, which is conversion of metaphor to sense. The findings of this study further show that Newmark’s (1988) first strategy occurs as the most appropriate one in dealing with translating the Prophetic metaphors into English. Keywords: Metaphor, Translation Strategies, An-Nawawi’s collection of forty Hadiths, three English translations.