A Comparative Review of Two Persian Translations of the Qur n: Fuldvand and Khorramdel

The Holy Qur’n, being the sacred book of Islam, is the basis of its legal code. Cross reviews of various Qur’n translations, through juxtaposing of parallel renditions, facilitate a better understanding of strengths and weaknesses and ultimately serve the efforts toward capturing the Divine message in an accurate and compressive manner. The present article, itself a compact version of the author’s Master’s thesis, compares the two Persian renditions by Fuldvand and Khorramdel, highlights their major differences and seeks to explain the source of these discrepancies by drawing upon numerous exegetical and linguistic (grammatical and lexicographical) sources and research from various articles.Whenever the two versions diverge, it is generally attributable to their fundamentally different approaches to translation, incompatible syntactic and semantic interpretations of the source language structures, different strategies in achieving cross-lingual equivalence and finally occasional lack of due care on the part of the translators.