Abstract nouns in the Holy Qur'an: A Corpus-based Translation approach

Abstract

The current thesis is a corpus- based linguistic study of eight different prominent translations of the abstract nouns in the Holy Qur'an. The main focus of this study is to show how corpus-based translation approach contributes a new and an effective attempt to study and improve the available English translation of the Qur'an. This work presents a comparative study of a sample of abstract nouns in Arabic-English Parallel Corpus, Annotated Qur'anic Arabic Corpus. The researcher aims to find out how the very same abstract noun differs in each single use, and how the very same noun differs in the very same use in each translation. The results also show the rich and diverse information which a parallel corpus can offer and prove that specialized parallel corpus can enhance translators' translation. As a method for comparing the abstract nouns in Arabic and English, the researcher looks at the way they are translated into English, their English counterparts, as some of them are culture-specific. The analysis part of study draws on Mona Baker’s model in using parallel corpora in translation studies applying corpus to translation study of abstract nouns. In this study I am concerned with applying the corpus linguistics methodology that concentrates on investigating language use to survey the way in which English translator of the Qur'an translate the abstract noun in question, using modern tools to discover new facets of linguistic behaviour in different usages aiming to suggest alternatives as necessary according to context. One of the researcher's main aims is to demonstrate the usefulness of the corpus methodology in translation studies. This study is also an attempt at explaining some issues in semantic relations which can be accounted for in terms of collocations by using a computerized concordancer that enables large quantity of text to be searched for all occurrences of a particular lexical item.