Dr. Ouided Sekhri
University of Mentouri Brothers of Constantine One, Algeria
Translating religions, as a branch of translation studies, caused hot debates for centuries and is still causing a lot of controversies. Many scholars point out the difficulty of translating religious texts either from English to Arabic or vice versa. For the sake of knowing which strategies suit best the translation of lexical and semantic collocations in religious texts and especially in the Holy Quran, and which modifications should be done to the source text in order to transmit the message to the target readers, this study sheds light on the strategies adopted by Master English students at Brothers Mentouri University of Constantine as novice translators in order to see their approach. As a result, the researcher selected a purposive sample composed of about forty first year Master students (Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) registered in the Department of English. The data investigated was composed of about twenty collocations found in the Holy Quran. After the students translated these collocations from English into Arabic, the results have shown that students have used different strategies as a way of solving the problem of the untranslatability of some religious collocations. The used strategies were synonymy, omission, generalisation, paraphrasing, cultural approximation, and literal translation. In fact, synonymy and literal translation were the most prominent strategies. While the former have been used in lexical collocations, the latter emerged in the translation of semantic collocations of the Holy Quran.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Fourth Annual International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2020, Ahwaz.
