Lexical Qāla [ قال ] in Qur’anic Narrative Dialogues: An Analysis of Communicative Meaning in Malay Translation

Translation is a communication tool that involves cross-cultural meaning.Therefore, the correct meaning of a translated linguistic form alone does not guaranteesmooth communication, particularly in dialogues. This study focuses on the translation ofthe lexical form qāla [ قال ] in Qur’anic dialogues into Malay. The lexical form is oftentranslated into Malay as “berkata”, “berfirman” and “bersabda” (said/has said). Thestudy is informed by the semantic translation theory and the communicative translationtheory frameworks by Newmark. The objective of this study is to identify and evaluate thetranslation of lexical qāla and its derivation in selected Qur’anic dialogues. Based on dataextracted from surah al-Kahf, a descriptive analysis of the dialogues containing the lexicalform qāla [ قال ] shows that it is translated as “berkata” (said/has said) in many instances(48.2 percent) and as “ujar”, “berfirman” and “berdoa” the rest of the time. A contrastiveanalysis and evaluation of the narrative translation of the dialogues suggests that there isroom for strengthening these lexical translations based on the communicative translationtheory. This is so that Qur’anic dialogues could be presented more interestingly andeffectively.