In 1995, two preachers from Port Louis, the capital city of the island of Mauritius, published a Qur’an translation into Mauritian Creole. Le Saint Qur’aan did not actually claim to be a direct translation of the Arabic Qur’an, however, but was rather presented as a rendition of an Urdu Qur’an translation, the Kanz-ul-Īmān by Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921). […]
In his early, short bibliography The Koran in Slavonic (New York, 1937), the Slavic Studies scholar Avrahm Yarmolinsky asserts that there is no translation of the Qur’an into any of the Slavic languages, including Ukrainian. However, just two decades later, the well-known scholar of the Qur’an and translator Muhammad Hamidullah mentions an enigmatic Ukrainian interpretation
The Ahmadiyya movement, a messianic reform movement founded in British India in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908), was the first Islamic group to actively undertake a project to translate the Qur’an into various European languages in the early twentieth century. Their primary motivation was to make the Qur’anic text accessible to a broader
Gone seem to be the days in which it was the state of the art for a Muslim translator to name their work something along the lines of ‘A Probably Failed Attempt at Translating Some of the Approximate Meanings of the Verses of the Holy Qur’an into English’. Instead, when one browses websites or Islamic
A guest contribution by Masyithah Mardhatillah & Moh. Hafid Effendy, IAIN Madura, Pamekasan, Indonesia No less than four translations of the Qur’an into Madurese, a native language of the island of Madura in the Java Sea, off the northeastern coast of Java, have been produced in the last twenty years. One of these is now
Prof. Ali Özek (1932–2021) was a leading Turkish scholar in religious studies, and for much of his career was affiliated with the theological faculty of Turkey’s most renowned educational institution, Marmara University in Istanbul. As early as in 1982, he published a translation of the Qur’an into Turkish, ‘Kur’an-ı Kerim ve Türkçe Açıklamalı Meali’ (which he undertook
Mullah Muhammad Jalizadah (1876–1943, also known as Mullah Gewre, ‘Great Mullah’, in Kurdish) was a renowned Islamic scholar from South Kurdistan in Iraq. He was born and raised in a prominent scholarly family, and his father and grandfather (Mullah Abdullah and Mullah Asa’d Jalizadah) were both also high ranking scholars in the region. Born in
There is no reason to assume that the field of Qur’an translation remains untouched by the commercial opportunities inherent in machine translation and the predatory use of online content. And, indeed, if you search Amazon.com for English Qur’an translations, one of the many options offered to you is a prime example of both phenomena: The
Qur’an translation of the week #200: The Brave New World of machine translation Read More »
With around seven million speakers, Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia, and is also used in some parts of China. Mongolian Muslims, the majority of whom are of Kazakh origin, constitute a small percentage (around five percent) of the country’s total population of 3.5 million, and predominantly live in the western province of Bayan-Ölgii.
A guest contribution by Moh. Azwar Hairul (IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo, Indonesia) The Ministry of Religious Affairs of Indonesia (henceforth MoRA) has played a crucial role in the mass production of Qur’an translations into the country’s official language, Bahasa Indonesia, and, more recently, into several local languages. Now it has taken the next step. In
