Translating aspects of lexical-semantic opposition from Qur’anic Arabic into English: a cross-linguistic perspective

The issue of Qur’anic (un)translatability has been the subject of much debate among scholars over the ages. Based on the analysis of a selected sample of Qur’anic antonyms, this article explores some limitations of Qur’anic (un)translatability at a lexical-semantic level, by investigating some of the challenges faced by a translator of the Qur’an when rendering ‘al-ṭibāq’ (antonymy) and ‘al-muqābala’ (opposition) into English. The purpose is to examine whether these aspects add to or detract from the (un)translatability of the Qur’an. The study shows that Qur’anic antonyms and/or oppositions give rise to multifaceted nuances that remain unrendered during the translation process. Due to the intricacies of Qur’anic style and unexploited exegetical polemics, a plethora of losses and voids tend to occur in Qur’anic translation. Syntactic losses include alteration of the syntactic frameworks housing the co-occurring antonyms. Lexical losses include lexical choices which are Arabic-specific and appear to have no equivalents in a target language. Semantic losses comprise semantic, not lexical, concepts borne paradigmatically by items in the source text but untranslated in the target text. Hermeneutic voids involve a translatorial choice of one strand of multiple interpretations of an antonymous pair over the others.