A linguistic approach on the role of "word" and "sentence" as linguistic units in the process of translation of the Holy Quran (case study of Surah Mubaraka Fatiha)

In their translations, the translators of the Holy Quran have paid attention to language units such as phonemes, words, combinations, phrases and sentences and they have chosen their translation method word by word, literal, free (adaptation), interpretative and semantic (conceptual, expressive, content to content). Each translation method relies on a linguistic unit and translators define their approach based on it. The present study, with a diachronic approach and descriptive-analytical method, examines the evolutionary process of linguistic units in various methods of translation of the Holy Quran and their evolution over time, and based on the translations of Surah Fatiha, explained and distinguished each one from the other. And by determining the linguistic units, the writer has explained the positive and negative points of each of these methods along with the challenges in the process of translating the Quran. The result shows that the developments related to the methods of translation of the Holy Quran have been in two fields of approach and linguistic units; It means that it is based on linguistic units from author-oriented or audience-oriented and has evolved from word to sentence; Also, in the beginning, the translators of the Holy Quran benefited from the linguistic unit of the word and proposed the method of word-for-word translation, then they turned to sentence-oriented and used methods such as semantic and interpretive translation. Therefore, the main difference between the translations of Surah Al-Fatiha is in the level of the primary meanings of the words, verses and the entire surah, which is caused by the author-oriented or audience-oriented view of the Qur'an.