Qur’an-Specific Cultural Items in Translation

One of the areas in which most of the translators of the Holy Qur’an have stumbled over, is related to the rendering of items belonging to the unique culture of the Noble Qur’an and Islam. In the translation of these Quran-specific cultural items, every translator with different ideological background adopts different strategies. So this paper is to work on the fifty Qur'an specific-cultural items in all surah(s) of the Holy Qur'an along with their English translations by three different translators A. Yusuf Ali, A.J. Arbery, and T. Saffarzadeh. The present study concerns with the Mona Baker’s (1992) theoretical model for translating culture-specific items to determine the strategies and techniques which the three translators of the Noble Book have adopted in dealing with Qur’an-specific cultural items. The results indicate that that the strategy of translation by a more general word has been the most frequently used strategy and the strategy of translation by paraphrasing using a related word is the least-frequent strategy either in the work of each translator separately and in the works of all the three translators as the whole. As a result, the translators tend to use more generic terms and to be more target-oriented.