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SURAU TEXTS TRANSLATED: TRANSLATION IN FORM, TEXTUAL ANALYSIS IN SUBSTANCE
This article investigates the translation tradition of surau communities in the Minangkabau world, with a focus on interlinear translation. With its prominent role in the Islamization of the region, the surau held an important historical function as a vital centre for the production, teaching, learning, and preservation of Islamic manuscripts—mostly composed in Arabic, while those written in Malay are filled with rich Arabic concepts, vocabulary, and technical expressions. As such, translation emerges as an integral aspect of engagement with the manuscripts, supporting both comprehension and instruction. Focusing on the manuscript collection of Surau Simaung in Sijunjung, West Sumatra, the study explores two central questions: first, the role and positioning of Arabic and Malay within the translation practices of surau manuscripts; and second, the origins of grammatical literalism, a feature often associated with interlinear translation in the surau tradition. This study shows that translation practices in the surau were diverse, encompassing holistic, running-sequential, and interlinear paradigms. Among these, occasional interlinear translation predominates, revealing a distinctive form of grammatical literalism rooted in the Arabic linguistic structure, reflective of post-classical scholarly practices. Rather than producing idiomatic Malay renderings, surau scholars pursued rigorous grammatical engagement with Arabic texts, transforming translation into a tool of learning and inquiry. Translation was not primarily about finding lexical equivalents in Malay but was fundamentally an exercise in textual analysis. It served as a vernacular expression of the post-classical Islamic intellectual project—translation in form, textual analysis in substance.
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