Translation shifts of Quranic conjunctive relations in English: insights from the Musa–Pharaoh narrative

This paper compares the Arabic original to Muhammad Asad’s English translation in terms of the shifts that occur in the use of Conjunctive Relations (CRs) in the Quranic narrative of Musa and Pharaoh (Surat An-naziʕ’at, 79:16–26). The study applies Systemic Functional Linguistics and House’s Translation Shift Theory to investigate the translation of CR forms, meanings, and functions across languages. The findings reveal systematic shifts from implicit, multifunctional particles in Arabic, /wa/ ‘وand,’ /fa/ ‘فso/that,’ /ið/ إذْtemporal, /inna/ إنّemphatic, and /θumma/ ‘ثمthen,’ toward explicit, functionally specialized connectives in English, with consequences for cohesion, semantic depth, and rhetorical nuance. Microlevel analysis indicates that the translations are generally semi-adequate, though /fa/ فis less adequately translated than /wa/ وand /θumma/ ثم. Such shifts reflect necessary adjustments at an interpretive level to maintain the balance between source-text fidelity and target-language clarity. This study shows that CRs are at the heart of expressing meaning, temporal sequencing, causality, and theological emphasis and therefore carry important implications for both Quranic rhetoric and its translation practices.