Rana Roshdy

Considered an iconic symbol of indigenous legal heritage, Islamic law is adopted nowadays in whole or in part in the legal systems of the Muslim world and is also of significance in Muslim-minority European countries, where it typically finds its niche in civil and financial domains. This article sets out to investigate the norms of translating Islamic family law discourse using a mixed methods approach based on ‘qualitising’ quantitative data, i.e., an approach in which quantitative data are interpreted qualitatively. Drawing on a self-built monolingual English corpus of over three million words covering diverse genres, the analysis will harness the power of corpus processing to enable the study of ten iconic lexical profiles (individual concepts/conceptual systems and their corresponding Arabic and English terms) that are specific to Islamic family law. Profile-based correspondence is also employed to investigate the probability of lexical variation in expressing a conceptual category—a profile refers to a set of synonymous variants or linguistic labels that can be used to designate the same concept. The corpus analysis seeks to identify the key loanwords that represent cultural icons featured in the English-language discourse of Islamic family law and to explore the different mechanisms used to render shariʿa-based concepts. The aim is to investigate concomitant translation norms based on linguistic frequency in the corpus and to interpret ideological implications with reference to the theory of translation norms, which postulates that translation decision making is subject to norms dictated by extralinguistic factors (e.g., socio-political or ideological). The study finds that Islamic family law relies significantly on Arabic loanwords (constructing an ‘Islamgish’ discourse) to maintain shariʿa-based linguistic heritage, which can be seen as a kind of ‘working for one’s own good’. Thus, what is at play here is the ethics of self-interest, which is very typical of postcolonial agendas.