Comment Re:Translate and Die (Score 1) 206
So that link you provide (modded informative?!) doesn't actually say anything about translations of the Quran - it's mostly about apostasy, which in the early years of Islam (during which those hadith were uttered) was politically equivalent to treason (which is often greeted with a death penalty around the world). In the early years of Islam, it really was Islam against the world, and the religious and political element were aligned such that all supporters of Muhammad were Muslim and vise-versa (plus or minus some civil wars). In modern society, the application of these hadith I think is questionable, but I'm not an Islamic studies scholar (just an Arabic Ph.D. student). There's also an image attached to the article that is just a judgment regarding apostasy rendered by the extremely conservative al-Azhar mosque, and has nothing to do with translation. Clearly non-Arabic readers would assume it does, which makes it rather sneaky.
As for translating the Quran, that's not controversial at all - the idea is that you can't really get the same thing out of it by translation that you'd get out of it by reading it (and in fact, that's not the same as what you get out of it by reading the commentaries, which are long and voluminous). A translation by necessity is one particular person's interpretation of the text, so to impose your interpretation is in a sense to change the original text. I might add one persons READING of a text is necessarily an interpretation, but at least they can bring their intellect, background, etc to bear on the original text. If you read someone else's translation, the idea is that you're not reading the word of god, but rather the word of god filtered through someone else's lense. So if you get a Saudi Wahhabi translation, it might have a significantly different take on the text than a liberal western educated translator.
With other texts, obviously, it's not quite as critical, and its often more accepted to translate hadiith (sayings of the prophet), and non-religious stuff has always been fair game - where do you think we get Greek philosophical works from? They were primarily translated out of Syrian and Greek by Arab translators, particularly under the Caliph al-Ma'muun.