The Transfer of the Implicatures of Iltifāt from Arabic to English

Translation of iltifāt is a major challenge for Qur’ān translators and has attracted the attention of translation researchers and linguists, alike. Iltifāt with its first- to third-person shifts in deictic reference is a remarkable style of the Holy Qur’ān and is used to serve various pragmatic functions, such as implicatures. The aim of this paper is to examine the translation of the implicatures of iltifāt from Arabic to English. To achieve this aim, the implicatures of iltifāt shifts from first- to the third-person reference were extracted from the source text, the chapter of the Qur’ān named sūrah al-Baqarah, with reference to a number of Qur’ānic exegeses. In addition, the study attempted to identify the strategies used in the translation of Yūsuf Ali (2008) for iltifāt in sūrah al-Baqarah. The analysis revealed that there are a number of implicatures of iltifāt from first- to the third-person reference which can be found in exegeses. However, these implicatures are not represented in the text for the readers of Yūsuf Ali’s translation. Translating implicatures from iltifāt requires intertextual cross checking from exegeses in order to attain the meanings of iltifāt that would otherwise be lost in translation.