Apart from matters pertaining to literary expertise in...

Apart from matters pertaining to literary expertise in classical Arabic and the target language, familiarity with the vast field of Qur'anic sciences and especially with the hermeneutic tradition of the past 14 centuries and the works of major exegetes is essential for the translator of the Qur'an. The Qur'an is the book of life meant to last until the Day of Judgment. Its meanings and concerns are perennial and everlasting.

Its roots are firm, and its branches are in heaven; it gives its produce every season by the leave of its Lord (14:25). It is an exhaustible source of meaning, meeting the needs of changing times, though its words and diction remain fixed and unchangeable.

Thus the human effort to extract its meanings is an unending task of interpreting and understanding the Qur'an, an understanding that links the eternal to the temporal, the terrestrial to the celestial, the mundane to the transcendent, and the relative to the Absolute. Hence in every era efforts have to be made to translate the Book in the language of the day and to interpret it in the light of accumulated human knowledge and Qur'anic scholarship.

In view of this perpetual necessity, there is the need to develop a sound and systematic methodology for translating and interpreting the Qur'an in different languages of humankind, for to translate the Qur'an is to interpret it.

For the purposes of such a project it might be essential to undertake a study of the existing translations and to evaluate them from the viewpoint of literary strength, loyalty to the meanings of the original, propriety and precision of the words and expressions used in the translation, and, above all, the translator's degree of familiarity with the exegetical tradition and the corpus of hadith narrated from the Prophet (S) and the Imam's of the Prophetic Household (a).

They are the interpreters of the Qur'an par excellence, for it is they who are the first addressees of the Qur'an, and to them one must refer for settling questions relating to Qur'anic hermeneutics as well as for authoritative interpretation in cases of disagreement in interpreting Qur'anic verses al1d determining the Qur'anic viewpoint concerning various issues.

That which could be very useful in this regard is some kind of a manual that might offer almost a verse to verse guidance to the translator, especially if the translation is being done from existing translations and the relavant works are not accessible to the translator.…