宗教言語の翻訳可能性をめぐって

―クルアーンにおけるメタファーを参照して―

抄録

This article deals with the problem of translatability of religious language, taking examples of figurative expressions in the Qur’anic discourse. In the traditional Western rhetoric, metaphor was a species of the figure of word, and was considered as the substitution of proper word into figurative one which has only esthetic effect. But, in the Arabic rhetoric, metaphors are not esthetic but cognitive, and lead to the clarification of the meaning of text. If metaphors come from the substitution of words, in translating it is only necessary to translate the proper meaning which lies behind its figurative meaning. But in the case of cognitive metaphors, translation may become hard task, because those metaphors directly participate in the process of the making-sense of discourse itself. It can be said we are in front of the limit of the translation, and are obliged to devise various ways of translation strategies.