Translation of Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan for Sahih Al-Bukhari into English -An evaluation study of his translation for the Book of Conditions

Abstract

Abstract:

Specialists are often concerned with interpretive translation of the Prophet's hadith and avoiding literal translation, because other languages stand unable to parallel the Arabic language in its statement, approach it in its methods, or match it in its structures and rhetoric.

It took Dr. Khan - may Allah have mercy on him - more than 15 years to translate Sahih Al-Bukhari. When he finished it: he presented it to a specialized tripartite committee, which checked it, then to the Secretariat of the Scientific Council of the Islamic University of Madinah, which approved it, and then to the General Presidency of Scientific Research and Ifta in Saudi Arabia, which approved it too.

This research presents an evaluation study of the hadiths in the Book of Conditions from his translation of Sahih Al-Bukhari into English. The number of evaluations reached: (57) evaluations. I divided them into (32) general evaluations and (25) detailed evaluations and extracted them from the (26) hadiths of the book.

The sections that are evaluated in a general fashion comprise: Sharia's words, transliterated terms, untranslated phrases, interpreted phrases, possible meanings, reversed meanings, unfulfilled meanings, the expressions of the narrators in the case of the narration, the names of the narrators and those mentioned in the narrations, and the different narrations of the same hadith.

The sections that are evaluated in a detailed fashion comprise: what was absolute and should have been restricted, what was restricted and should have been absolute, what was general and should have been specific, what was specific and should have been general, what was abstract and should have been made concrete, what was weak in context and should have been strong, what was wrong in defining its reality, what was wrong in specifying its action, what was wrong in specifying its characters, and what was wrong in specifying its place.