Tadhmeen (Implicit Meaning) in the Translation of Prophetic Hadith into English

This study investigates the challenges of translating tadhmeen in the Prophetic Hadith into English. Tadhmeen refers to a verb incorporation whereby a verb is imbued with meaning of another verb causing it to take the preposition normally collocates with that other verb instead of its usual one. The study aims to introduce a brief account of tadhmeen’s concept in Arabic, its characteristics, its function. It also aims to evaluate its translation into English. It is hypothesized that the interaction between syntactic structure and semantic meaning of tadhmeen may not have a direct equivalent in English, which may result in loss of meaning in translation. Nida's model (1964) translation theory of dynamic and formal equivalence is adopted in this study. It is concluded that due to the English lack of an equivalent tadhmeen structure, dynamic equivalence is used in an attempt to convey tadhmeen meaning into English at the expense of its characteristics, such as structural, rhetorical, and conciseness.