Tense Shifts in Quranic Verses: An Exploration of English Translation

Objectives: This study aims to explore the translation of tense-shifted Quranic verses into English focusing on more frequently used English tense(s). It seeks to examine the frequency of tense-maintaining and tense-shifting translations that have not been thoroughly examined by previous researchers in the literature. Methods: The data analysis employed a descriptive approach for forty verses collected and adapted from Tabl's (1998) Auslub Alʔiltifatfi Al-Balagha Al-Quraaniya and their translations by Al-Hilali-Khan (1417AH), Ghali (2003), Ali (1938), and Pickthall (1930) were the corpus. The verses have been divided into two categories, including 24 verses with past-to-present tense shifts and 16 with present-to-past tense shifts. Results: The results of the study have revealed that tense-maintaining translation is more frequent than tense-shifting, representing 67% and 33%, respectively. The present simple has been used frequently in the translation of the two categories, representing 55.2% in the first category and 53.9% in the second category. The past simple (32.3%) and the future simple (23.4%) tenses have been used in the translation of the two categories. Conclusions: It is found that in the translation of tense-shifted Quranic verses into English, tense-maintaining target language texts are more common. However, tense-shifted texts are used to maintain the meaning of the source language text.