A glance at lexical Qur anic reiteration from a systemic functional linguistic viewpoint and the hard task of translating such elements

Having dealt with “reiteration” from a literary, discoursal, linguistic and translation studies perspective, this paper has concerned itself with “reiteration” in sacred texts, especially the holy Qur’an, and has investigated the rhetorical, semantic and aesthetic objectives behind such reiterations in the text. An example of lexical Qur’anic reiteration in Sureh “Alaq” has been presented to compare two Persian and two renderings of the text with the original. The discussion proceeds by pointing out the difficult task of translating sacred texts in general and the Qur’an in particular, underlining the rather hard job of rendering Qur’anic reiterations. Regarding the alleged metaphysical and super-human origin of sacred texts and the delicate task associated with rendering such texts, the paper ends by proposing a ‘source-language oriented’ approach, which gives priority to the original text and culture, instead of a ‘target-language oriented’ one, which, on the contrary, grants precedence to the target language and culture, in translating this type of genre.