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 being transliterated into Carakan, one of Indonesia’s traditional scripts. This post tells the story of that project, Transliterasi Al-Qur’an terjemahan Bahasa Madura ke tulisan Carakan Madura.
Script is an oft-neglected but important aspect of Qur’an translation. Many languages have historically been written in a variety of different scripts, and it is a practice that in some instances continues to this day. A writer’s or translator’s choice of script goes beyond matters of practicality, it also has a symbolic aspect. Some scripts, such as the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, might be tied to a colonial past; others, such as the Arabic script, to a religious tradition; and yet others might be rooted in local, regional or national history. In the case of the Carakan script, it was used to write Javanese and other regional languages from at least the sixteenth century CE, alongside Arabic script, until both were gradually supplanted by Roman script in the mid-twentieth century. Madurese Carakan is nearly identical to Honocoroko, the Javanese variety of this script, the main difference between them being the use of vowels: Madurese tends to use ‘a’, while Honocoroko prefers ‘o’ for terms that are etymologically related.
The initiative to produce ‘Qur’anic Transliteration: A Madurese Translation into the Madurese CarakanScript’ came from IAIN Madura, a State Islamic University in Pamekasan. IAIN Madura is currently funding this three-year project in cooperation with Yayasan Pakem Maddhu, a local organization concerned with the preservation of the Madurese language and culture. Work on the project started in 2024, and the objective is to complete the transcription of all thirty parts of the Qur’an into Carakan by 2026, with ten parts completed per year. The project has two main aims: first, to preserve the Carakan script and, second, to raise its profile, which his important given that the script has begun to fall out of use, and knowledge of it is fading.
The team chose to base their project on an existing translation, and settled on that published by the Institute for Qur’anic Studies and Translation (LP2Q) for a number of reasons, including its use of phonetic spelling that conforms to the rules defined by the East Java Language Association (Balai Bahasa) in 2011 and the Madurese Language Congress in 2008. This translation is also deemed easy to understand and trustworthy, given that it was painstakingly produced in a process that took thirteen years by a translation team that included a wide range of relevant actors. Moreover, the LP2Q translation has been validated by the committee responsible for approving the Qur’anic muṣḥaf (Lajnah Pentashihan Mushaf Al-Qur’an), a body that is subordinate to the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs.
Yayasan Pakem Maddhu is collaborating on this project with a number of experts in the Madurese and Carakan languages, some of whom are affiliated with the Foundation while others are not. Eight experts have been enlisted as members of the project team: Moh. Hafid Effendy, the chairman of Yayasan Pakem Maddhu, as well as H. Sastro, Moh. Syafi’i Asyari, Isya Sayunani, Moch. Mi’roj Wiranto, Tola’adi, Yuniatul Kamariyah and Suhanda. Three of the team members, H. Sastro, Sayunani and Tola’adi, have taken on the role of reviewers, responsible for checking the transliteration work of the other members of the team. H. Sastro is a retired teacher, while Sayunani and Tola’adi currently work as Madurese language teachers at a junior and senior high school, respectively. The other team members are mostly Madurese language teachers working in various public schools, ranging from elementary to senior high school, except Asyari, who is a Madurese language expert, and who is tasked with typesetting the work.
The actual transcription work is divided up between the various team members, each of whom transliterates the parts they are responsible for on an individual basis using a font called potre koneng (lit. ‘fair-skinned princess’), created by Kiae Nabuy and named after a legendary female figure in Madurese folklore. Unlike other fonts used for local scripts, potre koneng is fully compatible with Madurese Carakan and functions as a plug-in to Microsoft Word. The transliteration is conducted manually, without any help from AI or automated software. According to one team member, “When we concentrate on what we are doing, we can transliterate the translation of about three to four verses in an hour”. If any of the team come across a difficulty that necessitates a discussion, they normally initially discuss it in a dedicated WhatsApp group, which often allows the team to arrive at a solution quickly. However, if the problem cannot be resolved this way, it is discussed during their weekly team meeting, held every Saturday night. It is important for the team to maintain an ongoing dialogue because even though they agreed on certain guidelines and standards at the beginning of the transliteration process, e.g., how to write parentheses in Carakan and how to begin a paragraph, they have inevitably been faced with many new issues and problems as the project progresses. Many of these issues arise because Carakan does not have any punctuation or space characters, while the Latin-script Madurese translation they are transcribing uses both. Such discussions focus exclusively on the technicalities of writing the Carakan script based on a Roman-script source text, rather than addressing questions of content or style, even though each team member has expertise in Madurese diction and structure. The project could thus be considered a contribution to the production of a variant of the Carakan script suitable for use with present-day Madurese.
The first ever printed sample consists of two volumes that cover the first ten parts of the Qur’an, each of just over 500 pages. The eventual plan is to merge these two volumes into one, so that when the project is completed there will eventually be three volumes, each of which covers ten parts of the Qur’an.
For lay readers who are not yet familiar with Carakan, the transliteration can be very hard to understand. However, the team aims to facilitate understanding by presenting the Carakan transliteration side by side with the Madurese translation in Latin script and the original Arabic text of the Qur’an. For the Arabic muṣḥaf, the team are using the edition prescribed by the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs, which is based on the Medina edition of the Qur’an according to the reading of Ḥafṣ. In terms of layout, the Carakan is placed on the left-hand side of the page, while the Madurese translation is in the middle, and the Arabic text is on the right-hand side. The books open from the right and use A4-size paper in landscape format to accommodate the three adjacent columns. The page header provides the name and number of the sura as well as the number of the Qur’anic part (juzʾ) using Roman letters in Madurese translation. The first two volumes to be produced have both been validated by the East Java Language Association.
Even though the project is currently still ongoing and the completed parts are only accessible to a very limited readership at this stage, the project team envisages reaching a wider readership of Madurese language experts and enthusiasts, including students of the Madurese language. By putting the transliterated text side by side with the sacred source text of the Qur’an that Muslims, who form the majority of the island of Madura’s population, believe to be eternal, the project team hopes to preserve the local treasure of the old Madurese script.
Masyithah Mardhatillah & Moh. Hafid Effendy
