Exploring the Adoption of Transliteration Strategy in Al-Hilali and Khan’s Translation of the Quran: With Reference to the Cow Chapter

This paper attempts to investigate Al-Hilali and Khan's use of transliteration in their translation of the Quran (1996) printed at the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Glorious Quran in Medina, KSA with special reference to the Cow Chapter. Transliteration is a translation strategy used mainly when translating proper names and culture-specific terms that may not have equivalents in the target language. The study adopts a theoretical methodology in data collection and analysis. The samples of the study are (53) transliterated lexical items from the Cow Chapter. The research findings point out that these 53 words are not appropriately transliterated. In Al-Hilali and Khan's translation, there is excessive reliance on transliteration by translating words like الْمُتَّقِينَ into Al-Muttaqin, الْغَيْبِ into the Ghaib, or شَيَاطِين into Shayatin although they already have lexical equivalents in English, i.e. الْمُتَّقِينَ is translated into “the pious”, الْغَيْبِ into "the unseen", and شَيَاطِين into "Satans". Therefore, Al-Hilali and Khan’s translation of the Quran has a huge number of transliterated words that already have clear and comprehensible one-to-one equivalents in English. On the other hand, certain Arabic Quranic words have been wrongly Romanized in English, like in transliterating words ending with (ين) such as الظَّالِمِينَ as Zalimun, الْخَاشِعِينَ as Al-Khashi'un, الْجَاهِلِينَ as Al-Jahilun, which should have been written as Zalimin, Al-Khashi’in, and Al-Jahilin. Additionally, all the transliterated words are capitalized by Al-Hilali and Khan following no logical linguistic reasons. The study concludes with some recommendations for King Fahd Complex to update this Quran translation.