A Study of the Efficiency of Berman's Model in the Assessment of Qur'an Translation; A case study of Rationalization tendency

Translation of the Qur'an as the most sensitive text needs to be accurately assessed. Reviewing and evaluating the Holy Qur'an's translation have been the subject to different books and articles for many years, but these reviews are often empirical and do not follow any special theoretical basis or pattern. Translation theorists have presented different models for evaluating translation, but there has not been a rigorous scientific model for evaluating translation from Arabic to Persian, and in particular, translating the Holy Qur'an so far. Systematic evaluation should be based on scientific theories and models. The focus of the present paper for evaluating Rezaee Isfahani’s ST-oriented translation is on five surahs of the Holy Qur'an, based on Antoine Bremen's translation assessment model, which emphasizes the maintenance of the nobility of the ST and avoidance of alteration in translation.
According to Berman's explanation, translation is the “trial of the foreign”. To create a sense of familiarity with the foreign text, it will construct a relationship between the “self-same” and the foreign. Again, it is a trial of the foreign since the root of the foreign work is its language ground. In Berman's word, this trial, often an exile, can also exhibit the most singular power of the translating act: to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its most deeply buried, most self-same, but equally the most ‘distant’ from itself. Therefore, he attends to inspect the system of textual deformation that operates in all translations to prevent them from being a “trial of the foreign” and called this the analytic of translation. As he claims the analysis to be provisional, he strongly believes that it requires additional inputs from other “domains”. Deforming tendencies interfere in the domain of literary prose. Language-based cosmos is in some aspects shapeless, which has generally been described negatively. Negative analytic should be considered through its positive counterpart.
By presenting 13 deforming tendencies in translation, Burman proposes the negative analytic for ethnocentric, annexationist, and hypertextual translations. He also stresses that a positive counterpart by other translators should extend this analysis. To study the effectiveness of Berman's model in the evaluation of the Qur'an translation, this paper renders an analysis to the rationalism of Rezaee Isfahani’s translation. Rezaee Isfahani introduces his method of translation as “sentence for sentence” rather than “word for word” and free. The priority in his translation is precision and it follows certain interpretive, theological, lexical, and literary principles. Another important notion, which we faced with, is rationalization that is concerned with syntactical structures of the original, starting with punctuation. Rationalization recomposes sentences and the sequence of sentences, rearranging them according to a certain idea of discursive order and destroys the element of the drive towards concreteness in prose. Generally, rationalization deforms the original by reversing its basic tendency.
This paper attends to the positive and negative analytic of data. In positive analytic, the translator's success and failure in the case of avoiding rationalization will be evaluated against other translators.According to Berman, positive analytic will construct a kind of anti-system the purpose of which is impoverishing or limiting the deformation of negative tendencies.In negative analytic, on the other hand, the cases in which the translator has used rationalization will be studied and it will be determined if it is possible to avoid rationalization or not after comparing the translation with other translations and text analytics.
This study also shows that rationalization is both compulsory and optional. Optional rationalization should be used in negative analytic while it should be avoided in positive analytic. Optional refers to unnecessary changes that are related to the translator's style and preferences. Compulsory rationalization, on the other hand, should be considered as a supplement in using the Bremen’s model to evaluate the translation of the Qur'an. Compulsory refers to the change of grammatical categories and meaning when it is necessary, and it is related to the differences between the two languages.
The cause of compulsory rationalization in the translation of the Qur'an can be searched in three sources. The first one is the probable oddness of the translated text owing to the lack of similar structures in TL which lead to literal translation. However, the absolute avoidance of rationalization in translation from Arabic to Persian is not possible due to fundamental differences between the two languages. This problem is minimized in the languages of the same family. The second factor is rooted in the language of Qur'an. The Arabic language is much more widespread than the Arabic grammar, and the Quran is revealed in the Arabic language, not Arabic grammar. On the other hand, some Qur'anic scholars believe that the language of the Qur'an uses the word for the sake of meaning and rationalization is in conflict with these principles. The third point is to pay attention to the cause of displacement in recognizing the necessity or unnecessary maintenance of displacement of Quranic expressions. The displacements caused by the differences between the two languages constitute unmarked information structure and do not harm the translation. However, the stylistic and rhetorical displacements that constitute the marked information structures must be preserved in translation.