Translation Criticism of God's Names

The process of message transmitting from the source language to the target language is always difficult, and undoubtedly, translation difficulty level of sacred texts, such as the Quran, is twofold. Considering the nature of the translation, it is not expected of any Quran's translator to present exact re-creation of the meaning and message of the Quran in target language. Just because of that, different experts as linguists and translation critics should identify and examine mistakes and errors which translators of the Quran encounter, to propose a practical solution. One of the major problems in the Quran's Persian contemporary translations is to select an equivalent for divine names and attributes used frequently in the text of the Quran. This study aimed to identify these fallacies through a survey of ten Quran's contemporary translations chosen from Noor software database randomly. For this purpose, translation of 15 items of divine names and attributes were discussed from the linguistic point of view. In order to increase the validity of the results, names with a high frequency in text were selected. A close view of all the details shows that the most obvious mistakes made in the translation of the divine names and attributes in Persian are: lack of consistency; the non-observance of the consistency in translating the names in verses with similar syntactical and thematic structures; the use of difficult and obsolete equivalents; ignoring the emotional load of the verse in choosing the equivalent; word omission (ellipsis); not paying attention to the lexical and syntactical structure of the word in Arabic language and so on.