Lexical Ambiguity in the Holy Quran and Its Rendition into English

The translation of religious texts has been a fundamental factor in disseminating the divine message throughout history. Ambiguity is one of the most important and confusing issues recurrently observed when translating the Holy Quran. Thus, translators must understand the original source text (ST henceforth) and transfer it faithfully, accurately, and integrally into the target language (TL henceforth). This can be accomplished through resorting to the authentic exegeses to get the interpretation of the meaning of the Quranic words that evoke ambiguity. The current study aims at investigating lexical ambiguity arising from homonymic and Homographic forms in the Holy Quran and its translation into English. Two reputable translations of the Holy Quran (by Arberry, and Hammad) are used and compared here so that we can assess the degree of accuracy in the light of Nida’s approach of Formal Equivalence. The researcher adopts the descriptive comparative analysis with the assistance of three exegeses (Al- Tabari, Al-Qurtubi, Ibn Kathir, and Al Sharawy) and two monolingual dictionaries (Al-Mogam Al-Wageez and Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary “Third Edition”). The results show that the translations of Arberry and Hammad follow the principles of Nida’s approach which is source-text oriented so that the two translators succeeded in rendering the words evoking ambiguity accurately into English. The results also demonstrate the effectiveness of Nida’s approach of Formal Equivalence in translating the meanings of the ambiguous words in the Holy Quran because it is centered on the source text and its central unit represented in its words.