Comparison of Personal Pronoun between Arabic and Its Indonesian Translation of Koran

The system of pronoun in Indonesian language and Arabic is diverse. This becomes the main consideration of the emergence of the current study. This comparative-descriptive-qualitative study aims at comparing the Indonesian translation of Quran with its Arabic version to differentiate pronouns of both languages in relation to gender (male, female, neutral), grammatical categories of number (singular, plural, dual), and tenses (past, present, and future). Al-Qur’an which is written in Arabic is then compared to the Indonesian translation of it. Moreover, the objects of the research are personal pronouns and the data are all linguistic units consisting of personal pronouns in the Indonesian translation of Quran compared to its Arabic version. The data were collected through content analysis. Then, the comparative and distributional methods were employed to analyze the data. The findings show that in terms of gender, personal pronoun has different translation in the two languages. Indonesian does not distinguish the personal pronoun that refers to male or female, while Arabic does. In terms of quantity, Indonesian first person pronoun kami ‘we’ is commonly used for plural. However in the translated verses, kami ‘we’ refers to both singular and plural. Furthermore, in terms of tenses, Indonesian and Arabic utilize different systems. Indonesian does not distinguish the pronoun in terms of past, present, or future act, while Arabic adjusts the grammatical conformity between the verb and the subject or between the adverb and the subject in relation to number, person, and gender to express an element of tense.