Effect of Religious Beliefs on Quality of Translation

Abstract

Quality of translation has become one of the main focuses in the field of Translation Studies. When it comes to the religious texts and their translations, quality of translation becomes more and more important as these texts are directly connected to the beliefs of followers of a specific religion, and since many of the religious texts have been written many years ago, and now the followers of that religion are neither able to learn the language of their religions nor have enough time to do so, delivering high quality translations is very crucial. In recent years, many translation scholars have focused on Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) to provide ways to translators and translation teachers to assess the quality of translations and consequently to overcome translation problems. In the present research, the researcher attempted to combine both of the aforementioned subjects. In order to achieve this goal, the researcher selected Waddington’s model for assessing the quality of translations, to see if the quality of translations of Islamic texts which were translated by Muslim translators were higher than those which were translated by non-Muslims. Two groups of translators were selected, one of them was Muslim and the other one was non-Muslim. Each group consisted of 10 translators, each of them translated 5 Islamic-religious texts, and after assessing the quality of translations and doing statistical analyses, researcher concluded that there was no relation between the quality of translations and the religious beliefs of translators.