Addressing Islamic Terms in English Texts in the Indonesian Context: Transliteration or Translation?

Islamic terms are commonly used in Islamic studies throughout Indonesia. However, inconsistent English translation of Islamic terms has posed a point of concern with translation and transliteration used by Indonesian translators. Despite many publications about translating Islamic terms from Arabic to English, little is known about how Islamic terms are translated from Indonesian to English. Using the foreignization and domestication framework, this study investigated translations of Islamic terms from Indonesian to English by 34 translators from three different backgrounds - university translation students, teachers, and certified translators. This study used frequency analysis to count the occurrences of transliteration and translation of Islamic terms in the participants’ translated abstracts as the primary data. Secondly, the study employed the thematic analysis to find out participants’ rationales of transliteration and translation of Islamic term realizations from the interview data. The frequency analysis indicated that transliteration technique was used twice as much as translation in the Indonesian context. Additionally, the certified and university student translators prefer to use transliteration technique while the teacher translators favor translation technique. The study also revealed four rationales for the translators’ preference of transliteration and translation techniques. These were common practice, reader orientation, text characteristics, and personal motives. Pedagogical implications of the study were also discussed.