Fatemeh Khodakarami
Abstract
With the beginning of the 20th century and the continuation of the scientific and investigative attitude in the field of Islamology in the 18th and 19th centuries, orientalists and Islamologists started scientific and practical translation of the Qur'an. The translation by Hartmut Bobezin, a German orientalist ...
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With the beginning of the 20th century and the continuation of the scientific and investigative attitude in the field of Islamology in the 18th and 19th centuries, orientalists and Islamologists started scientific and practical translation of the Qur'an. The translation by Hartmut Bobezin, a German orientalist and religious scholar, is one of the leading translations of the current century, which was translated directly from Arabic into German. In the translation of the holy books, especially the Holy Quran, due to the fact that the divine word is interpretive and has various layers of meaning, in order to express the deep meaning of the Quran, in addition to the science of translation, knowledge and awareness of the wisdom of the Quranic verses, as well as the translator's understanding of the interpretations of the verses, are necessary. The purpose of this article is to criticize and examine Bobzin's Quranic translation from a text-oriented or audience-oriented point of view, based on the equivalents of the analysis and evaluation of the translated texts by Werner Koller in comparison with the Quranic translation of Rückert (19th century) and Rudi Parte (20th century), asking the question whether Bobzin's translation was a successful translation from a communicative reader-oriented perspective (functional equivalent) in terms of explaining the Qur'anic meaning and spiritual effect, and to what extent the morphological-syntactic and rhetorical structure of the Arabic language (formal equivalent) was transferred to the standard language of the destination. The result of this research is to confirm the accuracy of Bobzin's Quranic translation.Background of the Research: Robert von Ketton first translated the Qur'an into Latin. In 1543, Swiss theologian Theodor Bibliander published a more complete translation of the Qur'an based on Ketton's translation in Basel, Switzerland. The first translator of the Qur'an in German is Salmon Schweigerr. The German priest David Friedrich Megerlin is the seventh translator of the Quran and the first translator of the Quran from Arabic to German, who first translated the Quran from Arabic to German in 1772. In the current century, with the increase in Muslim immigration to European countries, figures such as Adel Theodor Khoury, a Lebanese theologian and Islamic scholar, Murad Wilfried Hoffmann, a German lawyer and diplomat who converted to Islam in 1980, and Hartmut Bobzin published more complete translations of the Quran, which have received much attention. Argument& DiscussionThe first question that is usually asked in the translation process is the purpose of translation. Translation as a purposeful process plays a significant role in establishing communication and interaction between different linguistic communities and is the most important tool in transferring and adapting linguistic concepts. Albert Naida, one of the contemporary theorists of Bible translation and a believer in formal-dynamic balance, considers translation to be the re-expression of a message from the source language in the form of its closest and most natural equivalent to the target language, observing the meaning in the first step and observing the writing style in the second step.The Swiss linguist and theoretician who believes in establishing balance in translation, Werner Koller, believes that the translator should determine the type of balance according to the type of text and his/her reading of the text. There are five types of textual balance: 1- Balance on the content level of the text 2- Balance on the semantic level of the text 3- Balance on the level of the text type 4- Pragmatic balance 5- Formal-aesthetic balance. Koller believes in three models for the analysis of the translated text: 1- Text analysis. 2- Comparison of translations 3- Evaluation of translation in terms of translation quality in choosing words to convey meaning and aesthetic senseConclusion:In the examination of Quranic translations of the last fifty years, it seems that the criterion of translations is its reader-centeredness. In Bobzin's translation, the expressiveness of the expression, the naturalness of the language structure, and the comprehensibility of the text message, which are among the priorities of dynamic translation, are well taken into account. The translator has tried to be faithful to the original text, while using the words, to choose equivalents that are closer to the target language in terms of maintaining the balance in the content and meaning of the text, as well as the formal-aesthetic balance, and the German-speaking reader can accept the translation. Based on Werner Kolor's evaluation model, Bobzin's translation can be considered a successful translation in terms of the quality of the translation in the selection of suitable and equivalent words to convey the meaning and aesthetic sense, and his translation style is an example of the "content-to-content" translation.