First Academic Translation of Quran into Bulgarian
Teophanov learned about the Arabic language by chance and this led to major developments in his life.
He was born in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, in 1952. When he was a teenage students, he once saw a book in Arabic at a bookstore. He was attracted to the Arabic words and letters and got interested in learning the language.
In 1972, at the age of 20, he went on Iraq to study Arabic at the University of Baghdad.
After returning to his country, he became a professor at the University of Sofia, teachings old and modern Arabic literature, philosophy and civilization of the Arab world.
He also translated different works from Arabic into Bulgarian.
Teophanov later got his PhD from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy in Moscow and in 1992 became the director of University of Sofia’s Center for Oriental Cultures and Languages.
In 1992, when he was translating the Quran into Bulgarian, he embraced Islam and in the same year became the head of the Sofia Islamic Department. Currently he is a member of the US Orientalists Society and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.
Teophanov was invited by a publishing house in Bulgaria to translate the Quran at a time when communism ruled the country and Muslims’ religious activities were restricted. The Communist Party of Bulgaria, though, had define the translation of the Quran as an ethnic work not a religious one.
He began the translation in 1987 and it took him three years to complete but he did the translation again and ten years later he presented a Bulgarian version of meanings of the Quran.
Read More:
He faced different problems during the translation, including the difficulty to find equivalents for some words, phrases, names and terms that would properly convey the meaning.
His work was not the first translation of the Quran into Bulgarian as one translation had been published in Bulgaria in 1944 before Communists assumed power in the country. That work had been translated not from Arabic but from English and contained errors.
In his work, Teophanov took note of Quran translations into English, Russian, French and German and tried to offer a translation that presents meanings close to those of the Holy Book.
His work is the first academic translation of the Quran into Bulgarian and the only one endorsed by the Dar al-Ifta of Bulgaria’s Muslims.
