Relationship Between Level of Educational Attainment and Employee Performance: Mediating Role of Individual Religious Affiliation

Purpose: This study empirically investigates the relation between education level and employees’ performance working in public sector universities from the viewpoint of Islamic religiosity when religious affiliations play mediating role. It has been experienced that more educated people are found to be more involved in performing tasks related to the religious affiliations. Due to the fact that people with higher education found less time to complete their religious obligations, they are more involved in alternative arrangements like charity and donations to fulfill the hunger of religious attainments. Therefore, in order to satisfy themselves religiously, they are more involved in religious affiliations. This high involvement in fulfilling religious arrangements impacts their individual job performance which is necessary to explore. Research Methodology: Data was gathered from the public sector university employees of Pakistan. Out of 900 distributed questionnaires, 520 were received with response rate of 73.65%. Regression analysis is performed in order to determine the association between level of education and individual performance. Further, in order to determine the mediating role of religious affiliations, the Barren and Kerry (1984) model is applied. Findings: Using questionnaire survey the results of the study showed that level of education significantly impacts the religious affiliations in positive manner and high religious affiliations increase the individual job performance. The results at this point indicated that an unobservable indicator, like propensity for logical rationale induces individuals for higher education and ultimately high religious affiliations. Recommendations: Based upon the results, it is recommended that religiosity and ethical values in management set up are need to be escorted by public reforms to let the identification of employees to their work values and their obligation to the performance of work-related tasks. Originality: This study would be a clear contribution in the field of human behavior towards making alternative arrangements in order to fulfill religious obligations and at the same time identifying the mediating role of religious attainments in determining their individual performance.

A Comparative Study of Pragmatic Losses in English Translations of the Holy Quran

The chief objective of a translation is to convey the meanings of the source text to the target text readership. It is the transfer of the content as well as the textual mood to the possible extent. However, achieving this objective remains a crucial challenge on account of social, cultural and linguistic differences among the people of different colors, religions and geographical regions. Morphological, lexical, phonological, syntactical, stylistic, social, psychological and cultural differences among the languages result cumulatively into a broad range of pragmatic losses during the process of translation. The situation gets more intricate when it is the matter of religious literature, especially, the revealed sacred texts. In this regard, it is deemed highly significant to identify the elements of pragmatic loss in the source text and their respective manifestations in translated texts for the awareness of the translators and readers to curtail the possible distortion of the meaning enshrined in the source text. The present qualitative research aimed at investigating three different English translations (wordfor-word translation, literal translation and running translation with lexical and syntactic expansion) of Sūrah al-Kahf of the Holy Qur’ān. The researcher traced and analyzed the instances of pragmatic losses in these three English translations employing comparative pragmalinguistic model which has been tailored for this study. The findings reveal significant similarities as well as differences in these three translations entailing clear manifestations of pragmatic losses. These pragmatic losses occur in the forms of loss of tense, loss of texture, loss of grammatical category, loss of gender, loss of textual meaning, loss of culture-specific terms etc. Finally, certain recommendations have been made for the contemporary and future translators of the Holy Qur’ān in particular and other religious or non-religious Arabic texts in general.