Translating Women in the Quran: A Corus-Based Analysis

Abstract

Over the last two decades, researchers have shown an increased interest in studying gender-related issues in the translations of the Quran (Hassen, 2012; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2018). Existing research recognizes the influence of translators’ ideologies on their translation of gender in the Quran. However, this research has relied on subjective approaches and small-scale qualitative analysis. The existing studies (Habibeh Khosravi & Majid Pourmohammadi, 2016; Maliki, 2015; Hassen, 2012; Herrag, 2012) tend to focus on a limited number of verses known to be problematic with regard to our understanding of gender and provide an in-depth textual analysis of excerpts from different translations. These micro-level methodologies fail to account for all the instances of reference to women in the texts and subsequently cannot provide a comprehensive picture of the representation of women in the translations of the Quran. Quantitative methods are needed to provide a systematic, more objective, large-scale analysis to account for all the instances of reference to women and to take into consideration the whole discourse defining and describing women in these translations. Thus, the present study employs, for the first time, a combination of qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), (an analytical approach for critically investigating the ways in which discourses construct, maintain and legitimize social inequalities) and quantitative corpus-based methods to investigate how women are translated in five different English translations of the Quran. The use of mixed methods analysis offers a balanced way to study gender in translation. While corpus methods provide a point of entry to the data through frequencies, collocates and concordances, CDA uncovers the connection between the text and the ideology of the translator. The findings make an important contribution to the theory and praxis of feminist translation by extending its boundaries to include nonwestern perception of translation and gender. This dissertation also highlights the role of translators as creators of meanings and explores different factors influencing their translations of gender.