English Orientalists as Translators of the Holy Quran

The present paper aims at discussing the problem of translating the Meanings of the Quran by orientalists with a special focus on approaches. Though a multitude of Arab scholars studied both purposes and approaches of orientalists when translating the Quran, almost no one of them approached the relationship between these purposes and approaches. Aiming at discovering the effect of translation purposes on translation approaches, we should examine the relationship between them by searching for purposes that motivated the orientalists to translate the Quran, and then we study the approaches they followed to achieve their purposes. So, what were the purposes of orientalists behind translating the Quran? And could the purpose of the translator affect his selection of the approach of translation and therefore the result, i.e., the translated text? Trying to answer these questions, we conducted a study on the translation of Arthur John Arberry, namely The Koran Interpreted.