Lexical Meanings and Mistranslation: an Analysis of English Translation of Munshi Premchand's Short Stories

Abstract

This study is qualitative in nature and aims to highlight a genuine difficulty with the translation that many foreign translators have. Put another way,idiomatic expressions and cultural terms cannot be translated easily. They need to be translated very carefully, keeping in view the intercultural subtleties. In this study, Munshi Premchand’s three short stories originally written in Urdu and translated into English have been selected for qualitative analysis. These shore short stories are Eidgah, Qazaaqi, and Kafan respectively translated into English by KhuswantSingh, Fatima Rizvi and Frances W. Pritchett. The study concludes that the translators, especially those whose own mother language is other than the source language, have a hard time translating idiomatic expressions and cultural terms embedded in the very culture of the source language because they are not fully aware of the intercultural transnational intricacies and the intercultural pragmatics. This is what creates mistranslation and misleading meanings.