Quoting verses along with Arabic

Question

Salam to all friends. I think you all do know that Injeel, Torah, Zaboor have been corrupted. As I was thinking about reasons of their corruption I thought main reason was translations. Since long Bible is translated from Hebrew to Greek. Then from Greek to English. Then from English to Urdu. Then from Urdu to Pashto. So the bible in Pashto is very much varied than bible in original Hebrew. There are English, Urdu, Greek etc. versions of bible and the bible in English doesn't have original Hebrew with it. Same is for other languages. In the same time the reason that Quran is not corrupted(there are many but I am discussing one according to my point of view) is that Quran doesn't have English or Urdu or Hindi or Persian version instead with all translations Arabic Quran is also inscribed which reduces the options of being corrupted.

So my question is that here in community, some people quote just translations from Quran without original Arabic. What should we do with them? Should we flag that or edit that or leave that be as that is? Now don't say "Hey! Don't worry. It isn't that much great problem. It will have no effect." But I would say that we have to protect our scriptures by every possible method and Allah will help us in this. I agree it won't create a problem in this century or the next. But if we promoted this then it might become a habit and maybe after a thousand or two thousand years later we would face problems. Now don't say "Hey! Are you crazy! Protection of Quran is Allah's responsibility. Not ours." Indeed, Allah will protect it but we should do what we are meant to do.

Answer 1

It is important to remember that although we are a site about the topic of Islam, we are not an Islamic site. The Stack Exchange model is all about giving focussed answers to focussed questions, and as an English-language site, that focus should be on giving answers in English.

Your suggestion seems entirely focussed on how Muslims should behave, but we as a site are open to everyone, not just Muslims; I don't see that this provides any actual benefit to either the questioners or the answers. As such, I see no reason to enforce any such practice, and flagging or editing posts just because they choose to only quote English translations to an English audience just comes off as noise to me.

You are of course free to do so with your own posts, but I would discourage such unless it's actually relevant to the answer (i.e. if the subtleties of the Arabic text are vital to the answer and not captured in your translation of choice), otherwise all you're really doing is making the answer longer and harder to read, especially if there's no reason to believe that the questioner can even read Arabic.

My general practice is to just add an external link to either http://quran.com or http://sunnah.com (as applicable), as both of those sites do quote the Arabic text; they're readily available for anyone who actually wishes to read them, without unnecessarily cluttering the answer with text.

Answer 2

Translation is a difficult issue; take for example English and Bengali.

In English it's only possible to say 'he' or 'she'; that is the third person always shows gender; whereas in Bengali it's possible to do without. This means in translating from Bengali to English sometimes a gender inflection is introduced where originally there is none.

There's in fact a whole theory of translation which is constantly renewing itself as more becomes known or understood; with different people being engaged with the whole chain of textual transmission.

Quoting texts makes the answer lengthy; and more difficult to read; not everyone who comes to the site can read Arabic, whereas given the language the site is conducted in we can be sure that they can read English.

If a certain ayat or sura is important one can always link to a sura or an ayat; or refer to it in a standard way - this makes the answer tidier.