Translating 'Islam' into Japanese - Concerning the Japanese Version of the Qur'an and Its Translation Strategy

Abstract

Japan is a country whose religious traditions are the furthest removed from monotheistic belief systems. Japanʼs oldest indigenous belief form is considered to be polytheism and animism (neither being monotheistic), which eventually mixed with Buddhism that was later imported from China and Korea. In such historical circumstances, it is supposedly difficult to obtain a thorough understanding of monotheistic philosophy and belief. To this end, we examine a Japanese translation of the Qurʼan under the assumption that the cultural distance between the source and target language is accommodated according to various translation strategies. What is the relationship between religious text, especially holy text that is at the center of faith and doctrine, and the act of translation? As any religion has its own cultural background, it will encounter different linguistic and cultural contexts from those inherent within it, when it is exported from its birthplace to other places. Herein lies the problem of the translation of religious texts. Since any holy text is written in an individual language, its translation into a foreign language may incur the risk of losing its original ʻholy meaning”. Specifically, “the holy resists translation” (Long 2005: 1). From such perspective, the problem regarding the translation of religious texts occupies an important place if we seek to understand the limits of translatability. In Islam, the Qurʼan is considered to be an “inimitable” text; only the Qurʼan in Arabic deserves to be named a sacred text, and any Qurʼan that is translated into languages other than Arabic is merely an explanation or commentary; basically, it is not the Qurʼan. As a result, there have been very few translation studies on Qurʼanic text. According to Abdul-Raof, “[t]he problem of Qurʼan untranslatability has always been dealt with from a theological and historical point of view” and “there is no study available today that accounts for the problem of untranslatability of the Qurʼan from linguistic and applied translation studies (Abdul-Raof 2001: 1). El-Hadary critically examined the concept of “equivalence”, advocated by E. Nida, between original text and target text, and discussed various questions about the “untranslatability” of the Qurʼan from the viewpoint of linguistic theory (El-Hadary 2009). Thus, translation studies about the Qurʼan have really only just begun. In fact, both Abdul-Raof and El Hadary deal only with the translation from Arabic to English. In this paper, I would like to go one step further in the Hitotsubashi Journal of Arts and Sciences 60 (2019), pp.39-49. C Hitotsubashi University