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The concept of translation encompasses a broad spectrum, including various forms of textual adaptation and adjustment that occur across languages and cultures. Within this spectrum, adaptation and imitation are also considered as part of the translation family. This study, conducted using a comparative, descriptive-analytical method, seeks to explore the issue of adapting a contemporary religious drama from Qur’anic narratives, employing Gérard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality. It examines the structural and thematic aspects of the hypertext in question—the television series Sahebdelan ( The Spiritualists ), directed by Mohammad Hossein Latifi (2006)—and its relation to its hypotext, the narratives of the Qur’an. The aim is to determine the extent and manner of the Qur’an’s influence on the adapted hypertext and to analyze the types of transformations that have occurred. The findings reveal that, based on Genette’s categorization of transtextual relationships, this form of translation from hypotext to hypertext constitutes a recreation of parts of the lives of certain prophets in the Qur’an in the format of a television drama. This recreation—shaped by filmmaking motives, media constraints, target audience, and the purpose of the series—has involved substantial changes to narrative elements such as characters, events, time and space of narration, and intertextual connections. These transformations have enabled the transmission of Qur’anic themes and messages in a contemporary and accessible language for today’s viewers. The impact of Qur’anic narratives in shaping the content and themes of this dramatic work has been significant, making it a prominent example of religious adaptation.

Linguistic and semantic differences are some of the main problems of translating the Holy Qur’an into English. The present study highlights the problem of lexical gap and examines a number of terms- totally 117 in 110 verses- of the Holy Qur’an, including the referential meaning of ‘sin’ and their English translations. The researcher aimed to find the strategies applied by three translators and three machine translation systems (MSTs) and to compare them.  In this regard, five frequent and common terms – ‘اثم’, ‘جناح’, ‘سیئه’, ‘ذنب’, and ‘وزر’-were selected. The strategies proposed by Mollanazar (2009) were employed to fill the gap.  To do so, the English translations produced by three machine translation systems (MTSs), namely Google Translate, SDL Free Translation and Systranet were compared with three human translation by M.H. Shakir, A.Qaraei and T.B.Irving. The results revealed that in most verses, almost in six English translations, a generic term was used without any additional information to make the sense clearer. There was no noticeable difference between human and machine translations in applying the proposed strategies to fill the gap and make the English version more meaningful in terms of these apparently similar but contextually different terms. Thus, it seems that these differences were not focused on, while rendering these given verses to English. 

Allusions in literary texts are among the elements which can cause intercultural misunderstanding. In this study, the translation of the  allusions of two narrative poems selected from Nizami’s The seven Images (Haft Gonbad) were studied. To this end, the frequent types of implicit allusions were extracted from the poems: The Black Dome and The White Dome . Next, the original text was compared with its English translations to identify whether these allusive meanings were found and transferred in their translations. To achieve this goal, Leppihalm’s (1997) model of translation strategies for key-phrase (KP) allusions was employed. The findings indicated that the most frequent strategy selected by the translators is literal translation. Rendering the poems into English literally, the translators ignored the implicit meanings underlying the allusions. The findings can have implications for translating literary texts.