A Diachronic Study of the Lexical Variations in Surah Rahman of the Holy Quran in Pikthall and Hilali-Khan's Translations in English
Keywords:
Translation, Lexical Variation, Diachronic, Language Evolution, OrientalistsAbstract
Translating the Quran is an arduous task because of its pithiness and eloquence as Arabic language is one of the most difficult languages as far as grammar and morphology is concerned. Different translations of this holybook in English language, starting from orientalists to the natives, have lexical variations on account of the language evolution throughout the time or the mother tongue of the translators. The present study focused on the diachronic translations of Surah Rahman by Pickthall (1930) and Hilali-Khan (1996). Firstly, it was questioned that which were the lexical variations and secondly what were the reasons of the lexical variations in both the translations. For this purpose, only content words were compared, and it was found out that majority of content words were different in both the translations; Hilali-Khan translation is based on simple vocabulary which was related to modern trends. Further, the lexical choice is based on the current use of the terms which were understood by the readers of this time.
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