Yusuf Ali's translation is a poor translation

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Oct 13, 2009 at 20:47

Plato wrote

>Hi dhimmi no more,

Hi Plato

>It was a great help because I had all along believed Yusuf Ali's translation:030.021 YUSUFALI: And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that ye may dwell in tranquillity with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts): verily in that are Signs for those who reflect.

Terrible translation. You will never find me quoting his translation of the Qur'an. I think that he was either not honest, which I believe is the case, or the whole thing was far above his head which is also possible. Yusuf Ali's translation must be the worst translation and as you might know there is a project here in the US to fix his translation as it is poor and tendentious. And here is an example of how poor his translation is (and i really suspect that he had no clue what is really translation?) : if you check the words wa qalat al-yahood which are the first words in Q9:30 he translates them as: the Jews say or in present tense when in actual fact the linear translation is

1. wa means and

2. qalat means said or past tense

3. al-yahood or the jews

Or: and the Jews said

And if you read Rasah Khalifa's (whose mother tongue was Arabic) I understand that he translates them correctly as: and the Jews said. Now if this is really tarjamat al-kilma/lafz then it must be said and not say. But there is a grammatical rule in Arabic called aspect where such word can be written in past tense but it is really read in present tense. Again the problem here is what is really the word in the text and not what we think grammatically the word is other wise we are editing Allah's words. Do you get it? And this is only one mistake

The fact is the great Arab grammarians realized early on that if you translate the Qur'an to another language then provide tarjamat al-lafz/kilma or a linear translation. It seems that tarjamat al-ma3na ( read this as translation of the sentence) is no more than tafseer/ta'weel (read this as exegesis) of the words of Allah and it is not really the words of Allah anymore. And this is one reason why you see in let us say the translation of the Qur'an to Persian that the Arabic text is bigger is size aya for aya than the Persian translation which is not the words of Allah anymore but only a guide to the arabic text. This is why we have to examine the Arabic in the Qur'an oursleves and not rely on these poor and tendentious translations

>A Saudi translation is more honest (Muhsin Khan, Hilali translation) where it says"...He has created for you wives from among...." which makes it clear that women were created for men.

This is better but it does not say zawjaat or wives and the ilayha or to her is singular and not plural

But you know the Saudis have no apologies to make as you will never hear from a Saudi that the word jihad means anything but holy war. Pakistanis? that is a different story

Yusuf Ali's translation is shameful and avoid any Paksistani/Indian Muslims translations as it seems to be an industry there and one makes a mistake and the whole lot follows.

Good translations? Pickthall is good. And if you disregard his nutty 19 thing then Rashad Khalifa's translation is good as well as Dawood's translation whose mother tongue was Syriac but he was also Arabic speaker from Iraq.

>Thanks once again

Any time

>Plato

I hope I helped

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