A comparative study of Kinayah interpretation on intimate relationship in Al-Quran The case of Al-Hilali and Khan's and Arberry's English Translations

Translation in religious discourse presents major challenges due to the complexity of conveying meaning across languages and cultures. With English as the dominant medium for global communication, the demand for translating religious texts like the Qurān has grown. Translators must preserve the source text’s depth, emotion, and spiritual resonance while making it accessible to a global audience. This becomes especially difficult when translating rhetorical devices such as kināyah, a culturally rooted figurative expression in Arabic that conveys sensitive topics indirectly and politely. Rendering kināyah in English is challenging due to the absence of direct equivalents, a difficulty compounded when it interacts with other figures of speech like metonymy and euphemism. This study explores the pragma-semantic meanings and functions of kināyah related to intimate relationships in the Holy Qurān and its English translations by al-Hilali & Khan and Arberry. It compares kināyah with euphemism and metonymy in Qurānic discourse, focusing on politeness strategies and their translation, and analyses the translators’ strategies and procedures in rendering kināyah into English. Document analysis was employed, and the data were examined using Nida’s (1975) Componential Analysis Theory, Newmark’s (1988) Translation Strategies, Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958) Translation Procedures, and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory. The findings show that while kināyah shares definitional and functional similarities with metonymy, it differs markedly in type and classification. Euphemism serves as a central function of kināyah, adding to its complexity and the difficulty of finding accurate English equivalents. The study proposes translating kināyah as “Arabic metonymy (kināyah)” to highlight its distinction from English metonymy and preserve the original meaning. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in translating sacred texts and underscores the importance of linguistic precision and cultural sensitivity in achieving accurate meaning preservation