The Problem of Translating Different Shades of 'Al-Khawf' in the Holy Quran

The Holy Quran is a vivid aesthetic masterpiece in its language. Translating qur'anic texts is a problematic area for translators. The current study examines the problem of translating near-synonyms of the word 'Al-khawf' in the Holy Quran. The study is based on the translation of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan (1996). The study adopts Mona Baker's equivalence theory (1992) because it is closely related to analyzing the problems of Arabic-English Quranic translation. The Holy Quran contains many lexical items that express the emotional sense of 'fear' as a core meaning. It has been found that four Bakarian non-equivalence translation strategies are adopted: translation by a more general word (superordinate) which constitutes (61.25%), translation by paraphrase using a related word (35.00%), translation by paraphrasing using unrelated words (2.50%) and translation by omission (1.25%). It could be concluded that Arabic is richer in synonymy than English. The Arabic language uses lexical items that exhibits the features of similarity but they cannot be used interchangeably. In this study, the frequency of the word 'fear' in the target language is statistically calculated to reveal the semantic void. Results have shown that the word 'Al-khawf' and its near-synonyms are mostly rendered to the word 'fear' in the target language. The study recommends that the translators of the Holy Qur’an should accurately pinpoint the nuances among near-synonyms to produce better translation.