TRANSLATION OF OLD LANGUAGES WRITTEN IN PERSO-ARABIC SCRIPT
Nusrat SHIKHBABAYEV
QafqazUniversity
nsixbabayev@qu.edu.az
Baki/AZERBAIJAN
In order to develop a common method regarding how to render old languages written in Perso-Arabic script to English
we decided to consider their translations. We consider that in choosing them as examples, researchers will be helped to see
some difficulties and as well as problems related to the education and identity when rendering old languages. This will also
assist in developing and learning some more ways or strategies to translate the old languages written in Perso-Arabic script
acceptably. That's why we decided to raise and study this problematic issue and bring some clarification for further studies
and illuminate the ways of the researchers intending to render old languages written in Perso-Arabic script. We believe that
study and analysis of such translation difficulties and learning how misunderstanding or inaccuracies occur when rendering
them, can be useful for every researcher who is interested in translation strategies of old languages written in Perso-Arabic
script.
Certainly, many problems are likely to occur when rendering old languages to English. This is especially true of those
languages that are no longer currently in use and especially true of those that have been completely forgotten. Some aspects
of translation, such as accuracy or the effort to preserve the originality of source language (SL) meaning when rendering
into target language (TL), be it either old or modern language, has always been difficult and problematic. This is so
regardless of which language you are rendering to or from accept that when old languages are in Perso-Arabic script, the
magnitude of difficulty in rendering is significantly increased. In Perso-Arabic script, vowels are not written in most cases.
This is a type of writing system that where each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to
supply the appropriate vowel while reading. So, absence of vowel signs in Arabic, Persian and old Turkic languages, more
precisely, writing them without vowel signs in the professional form of the language using just one vowel sign to suggest
several vowel signs and make people guess which vowel sign belongs to which vowels amplify the problem. For example,
the letter 'aleph' - ' أ ' with a sign above in Arabic, Persian and old Turkic is used for each 'a', 'e' , 'u', 'ü' vowels, but the letter
'aleph' - ' إ ' with a sign below is used for 'i' or 'ə' (neutral) vowel. Certainly such confusions counting the weight of the old
words in those languages creates extra burden both for a reader and a translator.
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