Some mistakes in the translation of religious terminology

Abstract

Through this paper, I have briefly introduced some religious terms, which, in my opinion are rendered into Albanian in a wrong way and are losing their essential meaning by taking a secondary and in some cases, a completely different meaning.

Let's take for example the word "Hajj": to say pilgrimage or annual congress instead of hajj in fact loses its primary meaning and takes completely another one.

Through this paper, I have tried to arouse mostly the curiosity of the authentic researchers of linguistics and translators of religious books so as not to let that such mistakes happen in the future. These mistakes, which are being made while translating the religious literature from Arab and English and, especially, this phenomenon is noticed in the books translated in Albania, a phenomenon, which recently has been passed on to those in Macedonia and Kosova as well.

We will give another example to develop further this paper, such as: to say verse for the Koran's Ayat means to equalize it with poetry, than the question arises on who is the writer of these long verses in Koran?The Glorious God has revealed Ayats and not verses. This even caused a big polemics in the time of Mohamed a.s. when the renown Arab poets tried hard to create only a single Ayat of Koran and they have failed completely.

I do believe that in the near future the religious books will be of a higher quality as to translation and editing and such kinds of mistakes, maybe tendentious as well, will not be repeated anymore.

Also, a believe that this paper will have a positive feedback and the Albanian linguists will accept the transcription of religious terms, because in this way they will make a favor to Albanian taking into consideration that even the English uses transcriptions. Regarding to the bibliography, I have examined many books that have such mistakes. I have used mostly the Dictionary of Oxford, which incorporates Islamic terms as well.