English translation of the Quran by women: the challenges of “gender balance” in and through language

This paper aims to explore and discuss how women translators of the Quran have dealt with the patriarchal linguistic elements in the source text by focusing on two main challenges of translation. First the problem of gender agreement differences between the target and the source language. Because Arabic is highly gendered and English is not, many feminine nouns, pronouns and verbs become invisible in English and as result the “gender balance” created in original could be lost in the translation. The second challenge they face lies in the use of masculine nouns and pronouns in the generic sense, which as many feminists argued assumes generic human to be male and excludes the “human woman.” The four female translators, discussed in this paper, seem to react differently to these linguistic and translational challenges revealing a “feminine language” on one hand and reproducing the dominant male voice on the other