Manafi Anari: 400 Papers Submitted to the International Conference on Quran Translation

In the opening ceremony of the International Conference on Quran Translation on Monday, December 15^th, 2014, Dr Salar Manafi Anari, Scientific Secretary of the conference, maintained that “of the 400 abstracts, proposals and papers submitted to the conference, 4 papers were ed for oral presentation, and 245 were chosen to be printed and published.”

He then pointed to the changes in meaning through the process of translating, saying: “Linguistically speaking, every language has its own words and roots. In translating, especially translation of ‘sensitive’ texts like the Quran, when the meaning of a word/structure is expressed by means of its equivalent word/structure, the meaning will inevitably change. Manafi continued with the famous quotation that in every translation, “something is lost”, concluding that the task of the translator is to minimize this “loss”. According to him, in the case of such a sensitive and authentic text as the Quran, “no translation of Quran is Quran”, and however precise and accurate it is, no translation is fully equivalent to Quran.

He continued his speech by providing two reasons for the above-mentioned fact: the first reason –according to the science of Kalam or discourse – is that “according to Islam, Quran is the very words of Allah, and this divine nature of Quran gives it a holiness that is called by a translation scholar as “Divine Presence”. This holiness is translation-resistant, and that is why Muslims cannot repeat the translation of the Quran’s verses in their obligatory prayers. Concerning the linguistic reason, Manafi-Anari said that the semantic richness found in Quran has no full equivalent in any translation of it; hence “no translation of Quran is Quran”.

He concluded his speech by saying: “Most of the foreign scholars working on Quran translations have come to this conclusion that every appropriate translation of the Bible is Bible, those of Gospel are Gospel, those of Torah are Torah, but no translation of Quran is Quran, since it is the words of God.”