Translating Qur’anic ‘X-phemisms’ Muslims live by

Abstract

This study employs a pragmasemantic approach to investigate the challenges Qur’an translators encounter when rendering Qur’anic euphemisms of licit intercourse (X-phemisms) into English. To achieve the objectives of the study, two understudied translations have been selected for a contrastive analysis of source language X-phemisms and their target language renderings. The analysis reveals that Qur’anic X-phemisms do not lend themselves to an easy translation due to cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies; they hold a variety of lexical-semantic relations, and branch out into three broad ramifications: procreation, protection, and pleasure. Several Qur’anic X-phemisms have undergone semantic change through meaning-related processes, including generalization, particularization, amelioration, pejoration, and opposition. Some linguistic mechanisms have been manipulated to create euphemistic substitutes for direct references to marital sex through periphrasis, collocation, and figuration, all of which flout the Cooperative Principle in favor of the Politeness Principle.

Translatability of Ancillary Antonymy in the Qur’an: A Lexicosyntactic Approach

“…Research on Qur'an translation is so extensive that a single Qur'anic linguistic phenomenon may be the subject of multiple investigations. Consider, for example, shift (al-iltifa:t, Abdel Haleem 1992;Mir 2017), euphemism (at-talattuf, Farghal 2005Abdel Haleem 2011;Albarakati 2019;Hassanein 2020b), metaphor (al-isti c a:ra, Ereksoussi 2014Sharaf Eldin 2014;Alhusban andAlkhawaldah 2018), metonymy (al-kina:ya, Al-Salem 2008;Muhammad 2017), pun (at-tawriyya, Al Aqad, Sapar, Hussin, Mokhtar andMohad 2019;Al-Kharabsheh and Houji 2019), antonymy (at-tiba:q, Al-Kharabsheh and Al-Jdayeh 2017; Hassanein 2017), and speech acts (Salama 2021), among others.…”