Recently, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat has published a new revised German translation of the Qur’an. In this post, I will take a close look at this new edition and discuss some of the things that have been changed. The Ahmadiyya Movement has been translating the Qur’an into different languages for more than 100 years, with …
Today’s post discusses a Lebanese publisher’s attempt to bridge the divide between non-Muslim and Muslim French Qur’an translations by editing and repackaging the Qur’an translation by Denise Masson (1902–1994) for a Muslim audience. That such a divide exists is true of most European book markets. On one side of the divide, we find mainstream publishers …
Belarusian, which is spoken by around seven million people in Belarus and beyond, is probably the last official, state language in Europe into which the Qur’an has been translated. Belarus has a small Muslim population (of around 30,000, or 0.3 percent of the total population), consisting of an indigenous Tatar community, a newly arrived immigrant …
Is the translation of the Qur’an by a non-Muslim justifiable? And what authority do non-Muslims have to translate the Qur’an? These are the kind of debates that arose in the Netherlands following the publication of the first edition of Fred Leemhuis’s Dutch translation of the Qur’an in 1989. Leemhuis chose the word ‘weergave’ (‘rendering’/‘representation’) for …
Romanian is the state language of both Romania (where the Muslim population numbers around 70,000, or 0.3 percent of population) and Moldova (which has a small Muslim community, not exceeding 10,000 people). Most Romanian Muslims reside in the counties of Constanța and Tulcea and are of Crimean Tatar descent, rooted in the Tatar migrations of …
What factors determine the success of a Qur’an translations, or lack thereof? Why are some translations widely sold in bookstores, distributed in mosques, used in university courses, or ubiquitous on the internet, while others are hardly known and out of print? Zeinab Abdelaziz’s Le Qur’an: Traduction du sens de ses Versets probably belongs to the …
This week’s post concerns the phenomenon of “word for word” translations in English, with a look at some examples along with the translators’ introductions. Interlinear verbatim translations have a long history, and work more naturally in languages with shared vocabulary and structure with Arabic. A three-volume work first published in 1995 by the Islamic Book …
Qur’an translation of the week #63: Word for word translations in English Read More »
How does one translate the Qur’an into a language that has developed in a predominantly Christian context, and whose religious vocabulary has been shaped by that context? This is a question that all translators of the Qur’an into Western European languages grapple with. This is even more the case when Muslim translators are addressing a …
While most international Islamic institutions prefer to publish ‘Muslim’ translations of the Qur’an, this does not always mean that they do not also promote Qur’an translations produced by non-Muslim academics. For example, Max Henning’s German Qur’an translation (for which, see Qur’an translation of the week #37), has been published by a number of Islamic publishing …
This week’s post addresses Ozarenie ot znayuschego, sveduyuschego [Озарение от Знающего, Сведующего], a Russian translation of Fatḥ al ʿalīm al khabīr bi-tafsīr ‘al-juzʾ al-akhīr’, a tafsīr on the last juzʾ of the Qur’an by the Yemeni preacher Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh Bājammāl. The translation is by a prolific Tatar preacher and translator known by the teknonymic name …
