A Systematic Study of Metonymy as Rendered in the Persian

Translations of Mu‘ezzi, Saffārzādeh and Āyati It is widely accepted among Muslims that the Qur’ān is not only a sacred text with the ultimate goal of providing guidance and imparting Divine teachings to humanity, but also a literary work of utmost excellence which has fully exploited and further brought to perfection the literary and rhetorical tradition of its age. Therefore, having a sufficient grasp of the literary devices and traditions of that particular period is essential to developing a valid interpretation of itscontents. One of the literary devices, which is used throughout the Sacred Text, ismetonymy and is of great importance for its utility in expressing complex or inconvenient meanings, the study of which has been chosen as the focus of this paper. In this article we explore the ways for proper rendition of metonymic expressions and present many cases of metonymy, extracted from established exegetical and rhetorical references. Our objective is to impartially evaluate the strategies adopted for translation of such expressions in three contemporary Persian renditions. The outcome of our study is a series of tables which can be summarized as following: 1) In many cases, the translation fails to properly reflect the rhetorical mechanisms of the source language in terms of the target language structures. 2) Although metonymic usage is found in almost alllanguages, often there is a mismatch or incongruence between Arabic and Persian as far as the involved symbolic associations are concerned. Therefore, whenever possible, the preferred method for rendering metonymy is by employing another metonymic expression in the target language, so that in addition to fully transferring the source message into the target text, some of the rhetorical features are also preserved. In cases where such an equivalent is not available, the best option is to freely paraphrase the source expression and in any case, a literal translation should be avoided as much as possible. Towards better achieving this goal, a good command of stylistics is a prerequisite to viabletranslation skills in addition to a close familiarity with the cultures of the source and target languages.