خلاصة:
The Holy Quran, as an Arabic masterpiece, comprises great domains of syntactical, phonological, and semantic literary patterns. These patterns work as the shackle of translators. This study examined the application of the most common shift strategies in Catford‟s linguistic model for translation of topicalization in chapter 29 of the Holy Quran. The topicalized cases were compared to their coun-terparts in the three English renderings accomplished by Shakir, Nikayin, and Arberry. The study adopted Widdowson‟s classification based on syntactic, phonetic, and semantic features of the liter-ary devices as the main framework and Halliday strategy for the exemplification of topicalization as the second framework. The findings of the study depict that, Arberry, Shakir and Nikayin have shown a considerably greater tendency towards employment of Category Shift than Level Shift. Among the category shifts, unit shift and Literal translation respectively enjoyed the highest frequen-cy in the translation of topicalization. All the current translators preserved topicalization into target texts (un)intentionally. Finally, since the unit shift and literal translation proved the most frequently applied types of shifts in translation of syntactic patterns of religious texts from Arabic into English, the mentioned strategies may be considered as the part of schedule of translation workshops. Moreo-ver, since syntactic literary devices includes parts of the meaning of source text, so translators should pay more attention to preserve this phenomenon in translation procedure.
ملخص الجهاز:
In addition, it is cor- pus-based and attempted to compare and examine the applied strategies in English translations of topicalization in chapter 29th of the Holy Quran, as rendered by three prominent translators (Ar- berry, 1955; Nikayin, 2000; Shakir, 1985).
The following steps were taken in the present research: studying the Holy Quran and marking the samples of topicali- zation based on Halliday's (1985/1994) criteria; comparing the translated topicalised cases with their equivalences in the original text; and classi- 2 Al-Qalam 68 52 3 Al-Haaqqa 69 52 4 Al-Ma‟aarij 70 44 5 Noah 71 28 6 Al-Jinn 72 28 7 Al-Muzzammil 73 20 fying the most frequent strategies, which were applied by translators for translating the men- tioned syntactic rhetorical device based on the model of Catford‟s (1965) shift strategy.
Research questions considered in this paper concentrated on the extent of translatability or untranslatability of topicalization and the most frequent Catford shift strategy applied by transla- tors in the three English renderings of the Holy Quran.
In translation of topicalization, Arberry in 1955 applied unit shift or rank shift (abbreviated as US) as the most frequent strategy for rendering the marked cases of chapter 29th of the Holy Quran.
In translation of topicalization, Shakir in 1985 applied unit shift or rank shift (abbreviated as US) as the most frequent strategy for rendering the marked cases.
Nikayin has preserved 116 out of the 130 marked cases from the Holy Quran into English target texts in his translation.