A Syntactic Analysis of Different Translations of Al-Fatiha Sura: A Contrastive Comparative Study

Abstract

The present research is a contrastive comparative study that examines seven English translations of Al-Fatiha Sura by analyzing them syntactically and contrasting the syntactic analyses of the translations with the syntactic analysis of the Qur’anic seven verses of the Sura after comparing the analyses of the seven translations among themselves. The analyses are based on Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and summed up in the form of tree diagrams. The similarities and differences that result from the syntactic analyses are discussed and the findings of the discussion are presented. On the basis of these findings, some conclusions are drawn. One of the main conclusions of the present study is that the language of the Glorious Qur’an tends to use implicit elements which the reader can easily recover from the context, whereas the English language tends to have explicit elements, which is a serious problem in translation in general. Another conclusion is that most of the subjects, objects, and possessive pronouns in the language of the Glorious Qur’an are affixed (prefixed or suffixed), whereas all the English pronouns are separate words. Finally, the translators use clearly different structures in their translations of the Sura, especially in the three verses.