An Investigation on Historical Literal Translations in Terms of Acquiring a New Meaning by Prepositions

Abstract

It can be understood from joint translation activity of Samanids had undertaken the translation of Koran into Persian in the 10th century that Turks started to do works in order to learn their new religion's holy writ immediately after adoption of Islam. These works first started in word for word type and in a style named interlinear and based on a system requires to write the meaning of the word right under the line. While teaching members of that public the main source of a religion which has already been adopted, it is one of the best way to do translations in word for word type has the feature of first stage and gives the oppurtunity of moving to free translation stage in a proper way in the light of the data of lexical semantics. But one of the major limitations of these translation type and style is to have the translator obliged to go with word order and not to give a different meaning except for denotative one. Aim of this paper is to make an examination on the translations given in historical word for word translations of Koran in Turkish by evaluating the prepositions give new meanings by coming to objects after some verbs in Koran text with their functions in this semantic change process. The transcript presents in Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum number 73 was chosen as sample text because of being essential to examine translation success in terms of being supposed to be the first Turkish Koran translation or being the first.