Intellectual Transfer Across the Borders: Analysis of Dr. Ghāzī’s Annotated Translation of Al-Sīyar al-Saghīr in the light of Translation Studies

Abstract

Dr. Ghazi, a name in the jurisprudential history of Pakistan, will remain alive ever due to his seminal and thought-provoking, thought creating works almost in Urdu, Arabic, and English. He is a minaret of struggle and striving for those caught by various social, financial and administrative problems. The intellectual minds create intellectualism, and they transfer it intellectually across the cultural, geographical boundaries and Dr. Ghazi was one of them who created and transferred intellectually.  He translated from Arabic into English and Urdu, from French into English, from English into Arabic and from Persian into Arabic. This is really a unique combination of multilingual translation of a non-Arabic, non-English, non-Persian, and non-French scholar. He transferred the knowledge according to his own creative style of translation. In Islamic Fiqh, he translated from Arabic the earliest book on family law (Jean Allain: 2016) written by Muhammad bin Hasan al-Shaibāni ‘al-Sīyar al-Saghīr’ into English with the title ‘The Shorter book on Muslim International Law’. The book is distinguished with brevity, comprehension and terminological richness. It, as its title shows, contains important and difficult topics of Islamic Fiqh in a very precise way. The book is full of Islamic terminologies with specific meanings that need bilingual competencies of the source and target languages. The article deals with the annotated translation of this book under the principles and rules of translation studies specifically the shifts strategies of translation to find out the faithfulness of meaning transfer. The annotated translation discusses the places, terms, phrases and words that need annotations for their faithful rendering. The article will discuss to what extent Dr. Ghazi rendered faithfully the source message to the target language and how much places still needs annotations for their faithful rendering.

Keywords: Al-Sīyar al-Saghīr, Translation studies, Annotated, Strategies