Biblio-Systematic Review of the Factors Affecting Selection of Religious Translation Strategies

Abstract

Religious translation is a very sensitive task since it deals with God’s words and transcendental
commandments; taking into consideration that religion is an integral part of culture puts more onus on
translators to understand the target culture, inter alia, word’s connotations and denotations, author’s
intention, context, and other factors in order to choose the most effective communication translation strategy.
This study aims to conduct a bibliometric review of the most cited papers, authors and journals that are
interested in religious translation, in addition to the content analysis of the papers to identify the most
influential factors which affect religious terms’ translation strategies. This biblio-systematic paper addresses
all the articles published in Google Scholar and SCOPUS indexed database, that have “translation,
religious” in the title, and “Arabic” as a keyword (anywhere in the article). SCOPUS and google scholar
search resulted in 17 articles related to the paper’s subject which is "the Factors Affecting Selection of
Religious Translation Strategies between Arabic and English Languages. Bibliometric review results show
that the top-cited journal is International Journal of English Linguistics. Top cited authors are ElShiekh, and
M Saleh for their paper “Translation versus transliteration of religious terms in contemporary Islamic
discourse in western communities”. Regarding publications per year, the review shows that 2016 witnessed
the highest production by six papers and that Indonesia was the most producing country. The study concluded
that the most influential factor which affects religious translation is ideology and religious belief, and the
most used religious translation strategy is literal translation.