On the Translation of ‘Address Terms’ of the Holy Quran into English and Persian Based on“Politeness Theory”

This study aimed at investigating the translation of address terms from Arabic text of the Quran (ST) into English as well as Persian translations (TTs) based on politeness principle. The purpose was to evaluate the two translations in terms of implementing proper polite address terms. The data were gathered from the Original Arabic version of the Quran as the ST and two different versions of its English translations (Gharib and Yusuf Ali) as well as two versions of Persian translations (Fooladvand and Makarem Shirazi) as the TTs.  In order to analyze the data, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness was used. The most frequent translation strategies were also identified according to Vinay and Darbelnet (2012) as well as Harvey and Higgins (1986) for rendering proper nouns. Moreover, the classification of address terms by Aliakbari&Tohi (2008) and address functions by Biber et al (1999) was also applied. To achieve the objectives, the following steps were taken: address terms were extracted from Arabic, English and Persian texts of the Quran. Then, they were classified to different types, after that politeness principles used in the Arabic text of the Quran and their rendering were compared and contrasted, and finally translation strategies applied to render Arabic address terms into English and Persian were identified. The results of the study revealed that all versions of English and Persian translations depicted the psychological distance between Allah and people as the Arabic version of the Quran. Also, the findings showed that in the translation of address terms from SL into TTs translators did their best to maintain the words of Allah by rendering the words literally.