الفهرس 
Introductory ChapterOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This study sets out to examine a certain selected group of abstract nouns that would have posed a problem for the translators of the Holy Qur’an; there are certain instances of nouns that seem to have quite separate senses, in which case the noun demonstrates polysemy and may be construed in the mind as two separate
lexical entries. This corpus-based study is an attempt to investigate distinctive lexical distributions in translated texts from a top-down perspective. Its aim is to confirm existing intuitions about words with distinctive distributions, and, at the same time, to find out about exceptionally frequent and infrequent lexis that escape the naked eye. Although this is the analysis of inflected forms, polysemy lay beyond the scope of this work, it is hoped that our methodology and our findings
can stimulate such research, as well as analogous studies of distinctive lemmas
using corpora of different text types and other languages.
Words which at first glance (and according to the dictionary) are good
candidates for translational equivalents may only be so in certain contexts, as witnessed by new patterns and layers of meaning revealed by corpus-based research. This research has investigated the problems, and semantic issues related to abstract nouns that translators of the meanings of the Holy Quran tackled but not
successfully. It was found out that those problems can be traced back to reasons such as: the translators used synonyms, transliterated words that have
straightforward equivalents. Again, the research should not be looked at as an
attempt to undermine the great job done by translators, but a modest contribution to improve the translation of the Qur’an using corpus-based approach.
Hence, the significance of this present study, as it is an attempt on the path of using modern technology in studying linguistic usage, may enable us to find out new and important linguistic features concerning all linguistic fields, especially semantics, and to see how the Qur’an uses lexical items. The examples discussed in this research do not exhaust all the nouns that have problems but sample cases to highlight the problem.
This research has focused on the issue of translating polysemous senses of the
abstract nouns in the Qur’an with different nuances in adjacent contexts. By analyzing the corpus of examples of the various English interpretations of the Qur’an the researcher realized that some deviations and mistakes in some
translations are the result of insufficient reference to the exegeses of the Qur’an, lack of understanding, and inability to decode the nuances of polysemous words. If translators choose to translate by ignoring the nuances and connotations of polysemous and recurrent words, they would fail to accommodate all the meanings of the original; this is because synonyms, polysems and repeated words in the
Qur’an serve a purpose. In order to maintain the informative benefit of recurrent Qur’anic words and phrases, translators should attempt to reproduce them in approximate functional equivalents or compensate their deletion with lexical insertions, annotations or ideational equivalents.
In conclusion, corpora can provide larger and more up-to-date resources and can supply translators with better materials that are needed in explanation. To be concrete, in the field of translation studies, the advantages of the corpus-based approach consist in that corpora provide a broad sample of the originals and the versions extending over a wide selection of variables such as the author and the translator’s gender, age, class etc. This allows eneralizations to be made about
language, author or translator as the corpus is as wide and as representative as possible. This research has two major goals: a methodological goal and a practical one.
Methodologically, this study hopes to contribute to the body of research utilizing the tools of corpus linguistics in doing translation processes. Corpus-based techniques that are used here include frequency lists, keyword lists, collocation lists, collocation grids, and concordancers. This research aims to provide more
evidence about how each of these tools has something to contribute to the study of discourse. Practically, this study hopes to contribute to our understanding of the language, applying corpus-based method to translation researchers in general and to the translation of the Qur’an in particular. By employing research methods from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the current research aims to identify some of the strategies frequently employed by translators to manipulate the representation of the English translation of the holy Qur’an in ways that reflect their own linguistic background, and ideologies. One key method of deciphering the function of a lexical item is to look for polysemous nature of words that may be repeated with variant nuances in each case. When no compatible polysemous nuances exist in English, the use of recurrence in the TT may lead to a monotonous literal repetition that loses the impressive style of the message of the Qur’an. The
results of the study shed light on some linguistic aspects in the translation of the Holy Qur’an, using a corpus-based approach. These insights are of importance both in the field of Linguistics in general and Translation Studies in particular.
Key Words: Qur’an Translation, Corpus Linguistics, Semantic Prosody, Multimeaning words, collocations, Theory of Textual Meaning, Concordance Tool.