Transmission and Translation of Cognition Verbs in the Quran: French, English, and German

Abstract

“Transmit” is a transitive verb which requires an object which can be, among other things, “knowledge”. We transmit knowledge, sciences, traditions and many other cultural and human elements. This transmission may be intended or unintended. We will focus in this paper on the transmission of the sacred text and we will take the Quranic text as an example. The choice of this subject arose from the fact that the exegesis of the sacred text requires linguistic as well as theological and even historical knowledge. So, the sacred text is a kind of transmission from a divine author to a messenger and subsequently to a profane reader; while the exegesis of the sacred text is a second level transmission. In other words, it is a second reading of the text in order to transmit it from an exegete to a non-specialized reader. Translation is a kind of transmission and we cannot translate a sacred text without exegesis. In this research work, we try to take the verbs of cognition (to understand, to perceive, to reflect, to hear, to listen, etc.) in the Quran as examples to explain through the different translations, in French, English and German, the semantic nuances that the equivalence in the target language cannot always take into account. This could be acceptable in a normal text, but in a sacred text the faulty understanding could harm the exegesis of the text. It must be admitted that the conditions of transmission of a message surely influence its decoding by the receiver. These conditions vary in the same language and during the transmission of the message from one language to another. Decoding becomes more complicated when it comes to a religious text that neither the transmitter in the original language nor the transmitter in a foreign language has the right to modify or to grant it personal interpretations.