A Stylistic Analysis of the English Translation of Surah Al-Fil: A Comparative Study of Translations from Three Different Quranic Apps

Abstract

The Holy Quran is the holy book of Muslims and it was initially written in Arabic but it has been translated to other languages to enable the message to reach other non-Arabic speaking people. The theoretical framework uses the stylistic model of Leech and Short (2014) to compare the translations of Surah Al-Fil in three Quranic applications and how the decisions made by the translators impact the clarity, fidelity, and readability. This paper is engaged in a stylistic analysis of Surah Al-Fil in three popular Quranic mobile app such as Jazz Islam World, Quran.com, and Muslim Pro. Using a qualitative comparative methodology, the analysis is concentrated on four themes, namely lexical choices, grammatical structures, rhetorical devices, and cohesion/context. The results show that, as much as all the translations hold similar underlying meaning, they are different in style: Jazz Islam World is simple and straight to the point, Quran.com is somewhere in between poetic and factual, and Muslim Pro is analytic with theological commentary. The differences are based on the linguistic inclinations and the theological orientation of translators, as well as the target audience, which causes readability differences, clarity factors, and retentiveness of the Quranic eloquence. The paper sheds light on the increasing popularity of digital translations of the Quran and points to the necessity of the critical use of applications related to it in learning and worship practices. It also recommends the cooperation between language researchers and Islamic scholars and application developers to find the right mix between accessibility and fidelity and recommends further research to other Surahs, application updates, multimodality, and cross-linguistic studies.