A Study of Emphasis and its Mechanisms in the English Translations of

Emphasis or stress is a literary mechanism often used in (negative) imperatives to impart forcefulness or certainty to an expression and increase its persuasive power in the mind of the audience. This article begins by formally examining the nature of emphasis, its different types in both the source (the language of the Qur’ān) and target languages (English) and the various approaches to satisfactorily reproducing it in translation. The article goes on to detail the devices and mechanisms by which emphasis is expressed, including the (non-textual) elements of the speech situation, the audience’s perceptualcontext and other situational pseudo-linguistic factors. In order to present an objective discussion of the subject, three English translations from Pickthall, Irving and Abdullah Yusuf Ali have been used to exemplify each visited mechanism of emphasis. Our study of these works has yielded the following two main observations: First, often a translator’s failure to achieve cross-language equivalence stems from a lack of due attention to orknowledge of the capacities and peculiarities of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic systems of the source and target languages and their different approaches towards fulfilment of the communicative objectives. Second is the often apparent incompetence of translators in dealing with the differences between stylistic systems of Semitic and Indo-European languages. This has sometimes led to their rather superficial approach to translation, their relative negligence of the multiple embedded layers of meaning and an oversight of the common strategies and mechanisms of semantic expression in the Qur’ān.