A Sacramental Wordplay: An Investigation of Pun Translatability in the Two English Translations of the Quran
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study aims at examining a small part of the unique style of the Quran, i.e. puns. Adopting pun translation strategies outlined in Delabastita (2004) as a basis of measurement, the Quran and its two English renderings were hence analyzed to explore what strategies are applied by the translators on the one hand, and to discover the extent of (un)translatability of puns of the Qur'an, on the other hand. To serve the aims of the present study, the following steps were taken: first, the puns were randomly chosen from 80 verses in 40 S?r?s (chapters) in the Quran and their equivalents in the two English renderings were identified. Second, Delabastita's) proposed procedures for translating puns were applied to items in question to see which procedures were more frequently employed by each of the translators. Finally, drawing on Delabastita (2004) model, the (un)translatability of puns of the Quran was investigated. The results of the study revealed how feasible his proposed strategies are in terms of the translatability of puns in the case of the Quran. The findings of the study will hopefully pave the way for further investigations on the translatability of other rhetorical issues in Muslims' Holy Scripture. Also, the findings can be reconfirmed in further studies on other sacred books towards a possible generalization.Key words: The Quran, pun, translatability, untranslatability, translation strategy
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".