El Zeini English Translation

1.4.1 Nagwa Taha El-Zeini (1994):
El Zeini's PhD thesis is the first research to discuss the topic of the evaluation of Hadith translation. The main goal of her study is to set some criteria that can be used to evaluate the quality of Hadith's translations. She applied her new criteria to two English translations of Hadith:
1. The English translation of An-Nawaw's forty Hadith (1976) by Ibrahim and Johnson Davies.
2. The English translation of Sahih Muslim by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi.
She compared between two translations of 25 Hadith. Her main goal is to evaluate the two English versions of translations and give the word which one is better. She divided her thesis into two parts. Part one includes four chapters. Part two includes two sections.

This appears in the following illustration (El-Zeini , 1994, p. vi-vii):

El-Zeini's pragmatic input deals with the characteristics of the communicative situation and it is subdivided into twelve subdivisions as it appears in the above illustration. El- Zeini stresses the importance of the pragmatic component when translating religious texts. El- Zeini states that " pragmatic component is considered a background interpretative framework that constraints and directs the selection of lexis and structure in translation" (El-Zeini , 1994, p.367).
Lexis is defined by El-Zeini as the main factor of semantic equivalent and it is subdivided into eleven subdivisions. Structure sections deals with topics as modals and tense. The last division under the content related criteria is coherence. She defined coherence as the reader's knowledge required to understand the text. She says "the lack of the experiential matching would result in producing unfair judgment by the target reader" (El-Zeini, 1994, p.308).Coherence is subdivided into reader focused shifts of coherence and text focused shifts of coherence.

On the other hand, the form-related criteria are subdivided into and the stylistic component as