A Pragmatic Approach to Translating Speech Acts in Religious Discourse

The present study investigates the relationship between pragmatics, as the study of the intended meaning of the speaker, and translation, as the process of transferring texts from a source language to a target language. It shows how pragmatic meaning is outstanding in the process of translation, particularly the translation of speech acts in Arabic religious texts. It is an attempt to highlight the role of pragmatics in translating speech acts and to show how syntax and semantics are not enough to preserve the real intended meaning. Moreover, it demonstrates that translating religious texts is not only a matter of following the common linguistic categories of morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics, but it is also a matter of pragmatic meaning where the intended meaning in a particular context is an essential factor that preserves real meaning. Thus, the aim is to address an important level of translation, namely the pragmatic level. In accordance with this aim, it is hypothesized that translating Arabic religious texts involves problems at the pragmatic level where there are hurdles that should be overcome in the area of speech acts. These include the following as far as the topic and the data of the study are concerned: (1) the illocutionary force of some utterances is mistranslated, (2) no clear distinction is drawn between isolated and group speech acts, and (3) a speech act of one class is translated as another speech act belonging to another class; in other words, there is sometimes indeterminacy in translating speech acts and this indeterminacy can be resolved by reference to the global organization of the text. To this end, extracts from some translated Arabic religious texts are selected and the problems, as regard speech acts, are specified and analyzed. Then, the extracts are translated according to the suggested pragmatic approach which is more essential than the semantic approach.