Translating Qur’anic Deictic terms: A Systemic Functional Perspective

Abstract

Many grammatical structures are a serious problem in the understanding and translation processes of certain Qur’anic verses, crucial to the everyday life of believers due to their jurisprudential value. An example is the punishment suggested for the crime of “Fāhisha” in verses 15 and 16 of the fourth surah (Al Nisa). The two verses are understood and translated in different ways due to the ambiguity of the relative clauses in both verses that is caused by ambiguity at the level of reference of the two relative pronouns “allāti” and “allathāni”, known in Arabic as “asma’ mousula”.  This article examines the translation of these two problematic relative pronouns from a systemic functional linguistics perspective.