Authorship Attribution to Four English Translations of Ayahs on Man
Authorship Attribution to Four English Translations of Ayahs on Man

Summary/Abstract: This paper compares four English translations of sixty three Qur’anic ayahs on man (Asad, 1980; Ali, 1984; Saheeh International, 1996; and Haleem, 2005) and aims to find ways to measure and attribute authorship to each translation by means of forensic discourse analysis, focusing on word length average, word order and synonyms. As the translations were done at different times and by different authors, the paper aims to prove that the word length average is longer in the translations done by women, but also that the word length average for each author and the total word length average do not differ. In theory and according to recent findings, the word length average in written discourse is expected to be longer than that of spoken discourse. In this case, the expected word length average should be, regardless of the method used, close to the word length average of utterances even in translations. Therefore, we will compare results obtained by means of ordinary Word document word count, as suggested by Olsson, and KWIC, as suggested by McMennamin, after all punctuation has been removed from the corpus, except the apostrophe denoting possession. These results will be compared to (un)even distribution of key words and parts of speech, all leading to conclusions and comparisons in the four translations of ayahs on man denoting human being.

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