The Comparison and Evaluation of Anṣāriyān’s and Ṭāhirī’s Translations of the Kingdom Chapter Based on Garces’ Criticism Theory

When evaluating and criticizing the Persian translations of the noble Qur’ān, we cannot rely merely on the meanings of the words and sentences; rather, we need to adopt translation models and theories to examine and criticize the existing Persian translations of the Qur’ān and find the one that is closest to the original text. One of the methods that can be used as a useful framework for the evaluation of the quality of the translations of the noble Qur’ān is Garces’ theory that provides a model for the criticism of literary texts. When addressing translations, this theory does not merely attend to the meanings of the words and sentences; rather, it takes into account four levels. The article at hand evaluates and criticizes the translations of the Kingdom chapter by Anṣāriyān and Ṭāhirī based on Garces’ evaluation model in four levels (i.e., semantical-lexical, syntactical-morphological, discursive-functional, and stylistic-pragmatic). The most important finding of this descriptive-analytical study is that the translations of the noble Qur’ān by Anṣāriyān and Ṭāhirī could be criticized and evaluated based on the indices of Garces’ theory. Anṣāriyān’s translation is found to have numerous instances of lexical expansion, while Ṭāhirī’s translation is shown to entail numerous cases for modification, deletion, and reduction subgroup. This makes the positive indices of Anṣāriyān’s translation more significant than those of Ṭāhirī’s work from the viewpoint of Garces’ framework. Moreover, it seems that Anṣāriyān’s translation is more of a target-language–oriented and audience-oriented translation due to the great volume of data it has in the indices related to the target language domain.