Explicitation of the Cohesive Device of Ellipsis in Persian-English Translations of the Holy Quran: A Case Study of Twenty to Twenty- Seventh Sections

The Holy Quran, the message of the merciful Allah, in innumerable sentences addresses peopleto learn and teach His lessons. Since the message is deemed universal it should surpass thelinguistic barriers and this can be done solely through translation from the source language,Arabic, to other languages. English is an elliptical language in which ellipsis, as a cohesivedevice, is a common feature of discourse. Ellipses serve a very special purpose in the language ofthe Holy Quran, and their explicitation in the process of translation is expected to reveal a greatamount of hidden and implied meanings. Therefore, the way these ellipses are treated, i.e.whether translator opts for explicitation or leaving some concepts unchanged or implicit, is ofgreat importance in the process as well as the quality of the final product. To this end, the presentstudy examined the explicitation of ellipses in the English translation of Holy Quran, fromsection ۲۲ to ۲۷ by Marmaduke Pickthall, compared with three Persian translations of the HolyQuran by Tahereh Saffarzadeh, Naser Makarem Shirazi, and Hossein Elahi Ghomshei. Thetranslations were contrasted with the original sentences containing ellipsis and then comparedwith each other in order to discover the most frequently used strategy, explicitation orimplicitation, applied by the translators encountering ellipsis in the Holy Quran. In case of anyexplicitation technique the researcher applied Klaudy's (۱۹۹۳) [۱] typology of this technique tofind out the most frequent type of explicitation of ellipses in the sections mentioned. The resultshows that in most of the cases Persian trsnaltors left the elliptical cases unchanged, but whenthey opted for explicitation, they used optional explicitation more than other types of exlcitiationin their trsnaltion of Holy Quran.

کلیدواژه ها:

Cohesion ، Ellipsis ، Explicitation ، Explicitation Hypothsis ، Implicitation ، Translation Strategy