Pragmatic Approach towards Translation of Quran: A Comparative Study on Imperatives between Arabic and English

This comparative study sought to explore the translation of requests between God and Prophet in Holy Quran with focus on pragmatic approach. More specifically, the study highlighted the applied techniques in the translations of Quranic verses based on Bach and Harnish's (1979) model. It further analyzed the differences between the translations and examined the translations accuracy in rendering imperatives’ pragmatics. In doing so, some Surah with the most imperative examples were selected as source text, and two English translations of Holy Quran by Ali (1989) and Arberry (1955) were selected as target text. Based on the data, three types of the techniques as "requestives", "questions", and " requirements" were employed in the most of verses with 9 cases, and "prohibition" found in 6 cases. The identified differences between two translations listed as finding the right equivalents, choosing the correct verb, finding meaning faithfully, preserving the imperative function, selecting the common words in TL, etc. The results also indicated some inaccuracies as lexical and pragmatics, finding right pronoun, transferring the illocutionary force of the source words into the TT, and emphasizing on the same theme with different syntactic form. However, most verses provided the accurate factors as word order, transferring the imperative function based on the first interpretation, adding some words to clarify the context, conveying the intended function through applying the exclamation mark, and keeping culture-specific notion. It is worth mentioning that in most cases, the translators could successfully convey the meaning of Arabic words in to the English ones.