سورة الكوثر بين الإعجاز البلاغي وتحديات الترجمة

Since the inception of Islam, the translation of Quran’s meanings into other languages has always been an incessant need of the non-Arab Muslims. Although there are contrast views of Muslim scholars about the translatability and untranslatability of Quran into other languages for its innate miraculous meanings, tremendous efforts have been made, throughout the history, to make Quran easy for general public. Urdu is one of those languages in which Quran has been translated since Islam has brightened horizon of the sub-Continent. This research deals with the shortest Surah of Quran that contains plethora of meanings and rhetorical secrets with least letters, words and sentences. The research paper comprises of: Eloquence of al-Kawthar hinting the hidden semantic meanings. The problems of translating this chapter keeping in view to encompass the meanings of semantic eloquence during its translation. The researcher has confined the study to four Urdu Translations:   Translation of Sheikh Abdul Qadir, Translation of Sheikh Ashraf Ali Thanwi, Translation of Sheikh Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi Translation of Sheikh Abdul Majid Derya Abadi). The article deals with highlighting the difference between rhetorical miracles in the Qur’anic text and the shortcomings of its translations in an explanatory table and the research work comes to end with valuable results and suggestions.

Social Media and Political Communication: Usage of Facebook and Twitter by the Political Actors of Pakistan and Analysis of Audience Reaction

The advent of social media has opened a multitude of horizons for political actors and their audiences. Social media tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, are considered to be extremely effective means of propagating self-promotion, thereby enabling the political actors to timely inform the audiences about their political activities and views. Most political actors actively use social media to develop their public relations and project and promote their political ideology and preferences. The purpose of this study was to understand the behaviour of political actors of Pakistan in terms of their usage of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. The theoretical framework of this study was knit around strategic political communication and political public relations. In addition to this reputation management framework and relationship cultivation framework were also incorporated to explore the strategic communication of political actors. For this purpose, the survey was conducted among the political actors who were the members of provincial assemblies (MPAs) and National assembly (MNAs) in the last democratic regime i.e. 2013-2018. The total number of the respondents of survey was 247 out of which 207 were MPAs and 40 were MNAs. The purpose of the survey was to gather information about the purpose of using Facebook and Twitter and the quality of relationship they were cultivating with the audiences. Three different variables of quality: trust, satisfaction and responsiveness were selected from the work of Hon and Gruing (1999) and applied to this study. The content analysis of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of 34 MNAs was also conducted to evaluate the purpose of using Facebook and Twitter, image building and language used in posts. In addition to this, results of survey of MNAs and content analysis were also compared to see if there was any consistency between the perceived purposes stated by the political actors in the survey vis-à-vis the actual purposes depicted xvii in their shared content. The variable of credibility from the work of Kiousis, Mitrook, Wu & Seltzer (2006) was also studied to explore the reputation management strategy of the political actors. Based on the findings, it was concluded that most of the political actors were using Facebook and Twitter to propagate their own political agendas. They were also sharing personal content to cultivate their relationship with the masses and manage their reputation. Nonetheless, in this process they might be ignoring the quality and strength of the relationships. In terms of audience engagement, it was found that the political actors were generating different audience engagement on Facebook and Twitter with reference to purpose, language, nature and image building. It can also be inferred that the political actors were enjoying more credibility on Facebook as compared to Twitter as they were facing discouraging and abusive comments more on Twitter.