Translating the sacred

Abstract

One of the contentious issues in religious translation since the legendary St. Jerome is the degree of the translator’s agency. The point of contention has been whether the translator can exercise agency and freedom in translating sacred texts or they should strictly adhere to the form and attend to what St. Jerome called the “mysterious syntax” of the sacred text. Using a stylistic approach ( Abdul-Raof 2001 and 2006 ; Abdel Haleem 1992 ), we address the issue of the translator’s agency in religious translation by examining the translations of a unique rhetorical feature, namely the verb-noun alternation, by seven key translators in Verses 59, 64, 69 and 72 of Chapter 56, Al-Wāqi‘ah . Despite the general assumption that religious translation is highly constrained and that the translators of this type of text have little freedom, the findings of this paper show that religious translators, in fact, do exercise agency in their translation, whether in the form of adapting the source text to the target text readers or in the form of reproducing the grammatical patterning of the source text for cultural or ideological reasons.