Qur anic Metaphors and Their English and Persian Translations: Dead or Alive?

The present study aims at discussing whether the metaphors in the Qur’an, revealed more than 1400 years ago, are dead, moribund or live and how these three types of metaphors were translated in English and Persian versions of the Qur’an. The results reveal that among 70 metaphors examined, while only 32% are live metaphors, about 67% are moribund or inactive, and none of the cases are completely dead. Furthermore, based on Newmark’s procedures, only in 15.21% of the procedures used in both English and Persian translations of live metaphors there is no image while in 84.78% of them an image is present. On the other hand, 43.26% of the procedures used in translations of moribund metaphors transfer an image whereas 56.73% of them omit the image though they are not dead. Yet the point is that because the majority of Qur’anic metaphors are inactive, when treated by the translators as dead metaphors, the omission of image in this large number leads to diminishing the literary style of the target texts.