How Three Different Translators of The Holy Qur’an Render Anthroponyms from Arabic into English: Expanding Vermes’s (2003) Model of Translation Strategies

The present paper examines anthroponyms in the Holy Qur'an in three different English translations to shed light on how procedures used by translators can help target-language (TL) readers understand the implied meaning of anthroponyms. In order to conduct the research, the anthroponyms in the Holy Qur'an were isolated and English equivalents were identified. Then Vermes’s (2003) model was applied to the collected data to find answers to the following research questions: (1) What strategies are used most frequently by the translators examined to render the Qur’anic anthroponyms into the target-language (TL)?; (2) How consistent are the translators in using particular strategies when translating the anthroponyms?; (3) Does the type of translator affect their choice of translation strategy?; (4) Does the model suggested by Vermes (2003) cover all of the strategies employed by the three translators?; and (5) Which procedures are source-language-oriented, TL-oriented, or deep-reader oriented? Overall, the findings indicated that the procedures most frequently used by the translators were “substitution” and “transference.” It was found that the native speaker of neither Arabic nor English foreignized 96.80% of the Qur’anic anthroponyms by using “transference,” while the native translators of either the target-language or the source-language domesticated 71.00% of the anthroponyms by using “substitution.” “Substitution” was used when an exact Biblical equivalent for the Qur’anic anthroponym existed. Otherwise, “transference” was used along with notes to transport the meaning and form while remaining faithful to the intended meaning of the sacred text.


Introduction
Translating is the act of converting a written text from a source-language (i.e., the original language of the text) to a target-language (TL). For this reason, a translation may also be called a "target-text" (Afrouz 2020, 9). When translators produce a text which closely follows the grammatical and/or morphological rules of the source-language (SL) rather than those of the target-language, their final product may appear foreign to readers of the target-text. However, when translators instead decide to closely follow grammatical and/or morphological rules of the TL in hopes of producing a more smooth and natural-sounding translation, the result is a target-text that can be described as being "domesticated." TL readers might even assume such a text is "an original"-a text that was originally written in the TL rather than a translation of an original text.
A challenge commonly faced by literary translators is how to deal appropriately with the implicit information embedded in the original text and accurately convey it to the target-text with a minimal loss of effect. This challenge is often posed by proper names (PNs). Here the term PN is used to refer to the name of a particular or "individual person," "thing", or "place" and is normally spelt with a "capital letter" (Richards et al. 1985, 68;Crystal 2008, 392).
Curiously, translating PNs has often been described "as a simple automatic process of transference from one language into another, due to the view that proper names are mere labels used to identify a person or a thing" (Vermes 2003, 89). However, what is often forgotten is that PNs may be culture-bound markers of identity. Identity, as is stated by Afrouz (2017, 41), "has its roots in a nation's culture". The fact that PNs are frequently essential "for identification of an object or person" means that their absence can result in "the absence of an identity" (Aksholakova 2014, 466-67). However, according to Zhao et al. (2021, 42), "[p]ersonal names serve more functions than simply providing identification" since, in some cases, they may "contain meaningful information" including "ideology" (Bloothooft & Groot 2008) and "ethnicity-specific characteristics" (Nick 2013(Nick , 2017. That is the reason people usually "make assumptions based on a person's name" (Chen 2021, 12).
Source-language PNs, with their "complex semantic structure" and "unique particularities of form and etymology" can present translators with difficulties when they attempt to preserve these original features (Tymoczko 2014, 223-24). For example, PNs can indicate "racial, ethnic, national, and religious identity", and seem to be "the most problematic to translate, in part because their semiotic significance is so often culturally specific and dependent on cultural paradigms" (Tymoczko 2014, 223-24).
In this work, the term "anthroponym" is used to refer to the proper name of human beings. An anthroponym is therefore "a social sign and an indicator of a particular ethnic group" (Goyushova 2015, 80). A number of strategies for translating PNs have been proposed by theorists and researchers (e.g., Hervey & Higgins 1986;Newmark 1988;Hermans 1988;Leppihalme 1997;Vermes 2003;Pym 2004;Fernandes 2006;Särkkä 2008). Of these models, the one proposed by Vermes was selected for the data analysis used for this investigation. This model will be presented in section 3.2. For the present study, Vermes's (2003) model was applied to examine an ancient sacred text: the Holy Qur'an.
According to Afrouz (2019, 3), the fact that sacred or "[r]eligious texts" are typically rooted "deeply in a nation's culture" means that they commonly pose "a great challenge for translators". In the case of the Holy Qur'an, this challenge is compounded by the fact that it is considered the greatest literary-sacred text for Muslims. In fact, as it is frequently considered "a living document," Abu Nasr (1985, xli, as cited in Abdul-Raof 2001 even considers it to be "untranslatable" because "each time one returns to the Arabic text" there are "new meanings and fresh ways of interpreting" that may be discovered. This study examines how translators of this sacred text have approached the PNs it contains.
The type of translation strategy used can affect the process of selecting equivalents (Afrouz 2021a(Afrouz , 2021b. Some strategies can lead to the production of equivalents that are closer to the SL while other strategies may lead to equivalents that are nearer to the TL. These strategies are therefore called "SL-oriented" and "TL-oriented", respectively. Strategies that require the translator to provide detailed informational notes for readers are called "deep-reader oriented." The study seeks to provide answers for the following questions: (1) What strategies are used most frequently by the translators examined to render the Qur'anic anthroponyms into the TL?; (2) How consistent are the translators in using particular strategies when translating the anthroponyms?; (3) Does the type of translator affect their choice of translation strategy?; (4) Does the model suggested by Vermes (2003) cover all of the strategies employed by the three translators?; and (5) Which procedures are SL-oriented, TL-oriented or deep-reader oriented? On the basis of the answers gathered for these research questions, this paper will also discuss the feasibility of devising a specialized taxonomy of translation strategies for rendering anthroponyms in sacred texts. It will also explore the interpretation of translators' strategic choices.

Literature Review
PNs may "carry certain added meanings" whether being used "referentially" or "attributively" (Vermes 2001, 98-100). Anthroponyms are no exception. This section presents seminal studies that have examined translation strategies used for anthroponyms. For example, Dastjerdi and Sahebhonar (2008) examined the translated anthroponyms provided by Redhouse (1881) and Nicholson (1940) for the first Book of Rumi's Mathnawi. In their work, Dastejerdi and Sahebhonar investigate how translation procedures can assist translators "to elicit meanings associated with the proper-name allusions" (2008,41). To answer this question, the researchers used Leppihalme's (1997) model. Their analysis showed that the most repeatedly used procedure for the translation of personal proper names was "retention without any guidance" or transliteration without additional comment (Dastjerdi & Sahebhonar 2008, 41). The researchers concluded that "allusive PNs may be weakened in translation" and lead to a "relative loss of allusive connotations" (Dastjerdi & Sahebhonar 2008, 41-54). The researchers did not, however, mention whether or not Leppihalme's model covered all of the strategies employed by the two translators they examined. Neither did they attempt to identify strategies which could be useful in conveying the underlying connotations to the target-text readership. Therefore, in contrast to their claim, their study failed to provide practical and detailed guidelines for practicing translators, translation instructors, or translation students. Dazdarevic, Milovanovic and Fijuljanin (2013, 7) investigated "eleven Arabic names of prophets with their English and Bosnian established equivalents". Comparing and contrasting the prophets' names revealed that "translators, translating the Holy Qur'an from the Arabic language into English, did not use transcription of Arabic but they used transcription of Biblical names" (2013, 7). In other words, the researchers found that the translators in their investigation who rendered the Arabic text into English showed a preference for TL-oriented strategies. This preference may have been driven by the purpose of the sacred text translation: to reach readers who cannot read the Qur'an in Arabic.
The researchers' study included a native English-speaking translator (Pickthall 1930), a non-native Arabic-speaking translator (Yusuf Ali 1934), and native Arabic-speaking translators (Mohsin Khan & Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali 1999). Although in this study, the translators all used transcriptions of Biblical names, the native Arabic-speakers translated the PNs "using the transliteration and transcription of Arabic giving biblical names in brackets" (Dazdarevic et al. 2013, 8). Contending that "translators of religious texts must use the most common existing equivalent of a personal name in the TL even if these equivalents do not follow the foregoing translation strategies," Dazdarevic et al. (2013) asserted that the strategy translators most often employ is to transliterate the original PNs and add a "common existing equivalent" in brackets. According to , this is the most effective method for dealing with PNs in sacred texts. The very limited number of anthroponyms examined in the study and its restriction to the names of the prophets were significant drawbacks of the investigation conducted by Dazdarevic et al. (2013).
This methodological weakness was avoided by Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė (2014) who examined how anthroponyms are translated in audio-visual texts (AVTs). The corpus Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė used comprised 11 children's cartoons with English subtitles that had been translated into Lithuanian. The objectives of the study were to (1) determine the most frequently employed translation procedures; (2) ascertain whether anthroponyms were domesticated or foreignized; and (3) identify the problems faced by translators when rendering the English anthroponyms into Lithuanian (Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė 2014, 18). To achieve the aims, Hermans's (1988) proposed taxonomy was used. Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė discovered that the following strategies were used: non-translation or deletion, copying the SL name into the target-text without making any changes; translation; transcription by adapting the spelling and phonology of the SL to fit the TL; substitution of a SL name with one in the TL; "insertion and replacement of a common noun by a proper noun" (20); and "replacement of a proper noun with a common noun" (20). The most frequently employed translation procedures were (1) "translation" and (2) "transcription", while the least commonly used procedure was "substitution" (Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė 2014, 23-24). Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė also found that the translators had shown a strong preference for foreignization. Despite this wealth of information, the researcher failed to comprehensively address the third objective of the study (i.e., discussing the major challenges of translating anthroponyms). Goyushova's (2015) paper was devoted to a sociolinguistic comparative study of Russian, English, and Azerbaijani. Focusing on anthroponyms, the researcher found that the PNs underwent "linguistic and extralinguistic changes" when they function "in a foreign language society" (80). Unfortunately, this study did not consider translation strategies available for rendering anthroponyms in any depth.

Corpus
The corpus of the current study uses the Holy Qur'an as the original text and three English translations by (1) a native-speaker of neither Arabic (the SL) nor English (the TL), (2) a native-speaker of English (the TL), and (3) a native-speaker of Arabic (the SL). The translators are introduced in Table 1.  (Ordudari 2015). Abu Nasr was born in the US and wrote the first American translation of the Holy Qur'an (Ordudari 2015). The native Arabic-speaking translator, Abdel Haleem, was born in Egypt, and "[e]ducated at al-Azhar, Cairo, and Cambridge Universities" and "he has taught Arabic at Cambridge and London Universities since 1966" (Abdel Haleem 2005, ii). Abu Nasr and Abdel Haleem were native speakers of English and Arabic, respectively (Ordudari 2015, 200).
All 114 chapters of the Holy Qur'an were examined and the Arabic anthroponyms were manually extracted. As a measure taken to control for oversights, the corpus was checked by two MA translation studies graduates. Equivalents of these PNs in the three translations were then extracted. Altogether, 124 anthroponymic exemplars were included in our data analysis. Vermes (2003, 93-94) argues that translators use four procedures for translating proper names in literary texts:

Model
(1) Transference is used when translators "incorporate the SL proper name unchanged into the TL text" (93); (2) Substitution refers "to those cases where the source language name has a conventional correspondent in the TL, which replaces the SL item in the translation" (93). Such equivalents require "the least processing effort" on the part of target-text readership (93); (3) Translation denotes "rendering the SL name, or at least part of it, by a TL expression which gives rise to the same, or approximately the same, analytic implications in the target-text as the original name did in the source text" (94); and (4) Modification involves substituting the SL "name with a TL name which involves a substantial alteration in the translation of the form and of the analytic implications (if any) that the name effects" (94).

Procedures
Using Vermes's (2003) model, the strategies used by the three translators to handle the Arabic anthroponyms in their English target-texts were identified. The frequency of each procedure was calculated and the strategy preferences for the three different types of translators were determined. The potential effect of these three types of translators on strategies they used was then explored. Finally, the efficiency of Vermes's (2003) model in covering all of the strategies employed by the three translators was assessed. On the basis of our findings, the feasibility of creating a specialized taxonomy of translation strategies for successfully rendering anthroponyms in sacred texts was considered.

Comparing the Strategies of the Individual Translators
In addition to Vermes's procedures of Transference, Substitution, Translation and Modification, two further procedures were used by translators: Interpretative Equivalent and Notation. Interpretative Equivalent refers to cases where the translator replaces the SL proper name with an anthroponym which is interpreted by commentators in exegetical texts to refer to the same person. Notation refers to the use of informational notes of any type (e.g., footnotes, endnotes, notes within brackets, etc., accompanied by one of the aforementioned procedures).
The translators' strategies for rendering Qur'anic anthroponyms (SL Anth) into English and selecting equivalents are all presented in Table 2. The strategies are abbreviated as follows: Transference (Tf), Substitution (S), Translation (Tr), Modification (M), and Interpretative Equivalent (IE). In addition, in the farleft column of Table 2, there are two numbers separated by a slash. These figures respectively refer to the chapter number (Surah) and the sentence number (Ayah) where an example of the listed translation can be located in the Holy Qur'an. As is revealed in Table 2, the source-text oriented procedure of Transference was used by Habib in rendering almost all (96.80%) instances of anthroponyms. The only anthroponym rendered by him via using a different procedure was ' ‫َا‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ُّون‬ ‫الن‬ ' /dhannūn/. Habib, in translating ' ‫َا‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ُّون‬ ‫الن‬ ' /dhannūn/ as Yunus (i.e., John), and Abu Nasr, in translating '

‫َا‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ْل‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ك‬ ْ
‫ال‬ ' /dhalkefl/ as Ezekiel, used Interpretative Equivalent. While the native-speaker of Arabic, Abdel Haleem, had never employed Interpretative Equivalent, he was found to be the only translator who used Notation. Interestingly, instances of Substitution and Translation could only be detected in translations of the two translators who were native-speakers of either Arabic or English. But, Abu Nasr, the native-speaker of English, was the only translator who rendered the anthroponym ' َ ‫َارُون‬ ‫'ق‬ /qārūn/ as Quran by the procedure of Modification. The way he transliterated the anthroponym seems really problematic, since it is similar to the name of the Holy Qur'an; yet these two words are quite different, and they are even pronounced differently in Arabic. In Table 3, the frequency with which each translator used the five translation strategies is presented. 1 The frequency and percentage differences reported in Table 3 were indeed statistically significant. In order to calculate the chi-square statistic, it was necessary to replace all 'zeros' in Table 3 with number '1'. The chisquare statistic, p-value and statement of significance appear beneath Table 4.

Table 4. The Chi-Square Statistic for Translation Strategies Used by Translators
The chi-square statistic is 45.2257, the p-value is < 0.00001, and the result is significant at p < .10, p < .05, and p < .01.

Overall Findings and Conclusions
The first research question asked what procedures were used the most frequently by all translators in rendering Arabic anthroponyms into English. The findings indicated that substitution (47.30%) and transference (46.20%) were the two most frequently employed strategies by all translators, while modification (1.10%) was the least frequently employed. These findings partially confirm those reported by Dastjerdi and Sahebhonar (2008, 41) who found that "retention without any guidance", or transference in Vermes's (2003) Dastjerdi and Sahebhonar (2008) because in this investigation, the translator who spoke neither the TL nor the SL natively also used transference to render almost all anthroponyms in the target-text. With regard to substitution, the present study found that this strategy tended to be used when an exact Biblical equivalent for the Qur'anic anthroponym existed. 2 The second research question asked how consistent the translators were in using particular strategies for translating the anthroponyms. The translator who was a non-native speaker of English and Arabic was found to be the most consistent as he almost exclusively used transference to translate the Qur'anic anthroponyms. By comparison, the native English-speaking translator utilized all of the strategies studied here. Thus, he was the most flexible translator in his translation approach.
The third research question asked if the native-speaker background of translators affected their preference for specific procedures. This investigation found that the translators who were native-speakers of either Arabic or English mostly used substitution, while the native speaker of neither Arabic nor English did not use this strategy. Instead, this translator used transference for almost all Qur'anic anthroponyms (96.80%). This finding could probably mean that the two translators with native-speaker competence may have felt confident enough to substitute the original anthroponyms with their conventional TL Biblical equivalents. Conversely, the translator without this language fluency may have decided to simply transfer the original anthroponym. It could also be that this translator had strict regulations imposed upon him by the publisher about name translations, or perhaps this choice was made for religious reasons. An in-depth investigation of probable reasons is, however, out of the scope of this paper and requires prospective researchers to deal with the issue in a separate study. These results were particularly interesting in view of the fact that the native speaker of neither Arabic nor English showed a stronger preference for using the SL-oriented procedure of 'transference' and almost always foreignized the Qur'anic PNs, while the translators who were native-speakers of either Arabic or English mostly selected the TL-oriented procedure of 'substitution' and more often domesticated the Qur'anic anthroponyms.
Regarding the fourth research question, which asked whether Vermes's (2003) model covered all of the different strategies employed by the three translators, the data analysis revealed it did not include strategies that were used by the translator who was a native-speaker of the TL and the translator who spoke neither the TL nor the SL natively. On the basis of these findings, Vermes's (2003) model could be expanded to include the strategies of using Interpretative Equivalents and adding Notation. These additions would make the model more comprehensive and powerful for analyzing the translation strategies used for anthroponyms in religious texts in general, and the Holy Qur'an in particular. The new model proposed in this investigation can also be used as a framework for analyzing translations of other sacred texts such as the Old Testament and the New Testament. The expanded model could also be used by other names researchers who are not even working with sacred texts. For example, it could be employed for exploring anthroponyms in non-sacred literary and allegorical texts.
One limitation of this study concerns the limited size of the corpus used. Such a limitation could be considered as an obstacle in generalizing the results. Moreover, in this study, the researcher only had access to the work of a Pakistani translator who spoke neither Arabic nor English natively. Consideration of translators of other nationalities might have led us to different results. Future researchers can concentrate on this issue. Furthermore, this study was also limited in that it only focused on English translations of the Holy Qur'an. The results might have been quite different in other languages. Prospective researchers are strongly recommended to take other language-pairs into consideration. Examining whether Vermes's (2003) model accounts for translation strategies employed to render the Holy Qur'an into languages other than English is also a question that warrants future research. Notes 1 Haleem was the only translator who also employed the strategy of Notation. He provided 11.11% of the anthroponyms with informative notes. 2 In the absence of such equivalents, employing transference along with notation can be used as an efficient and accurate strategy for translating anthroponyms that appear in sacred texts like the Holy Qur'an.