Translating Political Idioms from Urdu to English in Pakistani Newspaper Editorials: Navigating Cognitive and Systemic Complexities

Abstract

This article examines the intricate challenges encountered when translating political idioms from Urdu into English within Pakistani newspaper editorials. Political idioms—culture-bound and metaphorical expressions interwoven with socio-political discourse—not only shape public sentiment but also frame ideological positions. Leveraging Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Wilson & Sperber, 2002) alongside Polysystem Theory (Even-Zohar, 1990), we explore how translators navigate cognitive effort, contextual relevance, and systemic hierarchies to render these idioms effectively for an English-reading audience. Extending the scope of prior analyses, this study investigates 10 distinct case studies derived from a comparative qualitative analysis of political editorials in six Urdu dailies (e.g., Jang, Nawa-i-Waqt) and four English broadsheets (e.g., Dawn, The News). Each case demonstrates a different idiom translation strategy—literal translation, paraphrase, omission, cultural substitution, or a combination thereof—and illustrates the consequent impact on semantic clarity, rhetorical strength, and ideological fidelity. Our findings indicate adaptive techniques risk diluting ideological and density, while literal translations often lead to semantic ambiguity. To balance cultural fidelity with cognitive accessibility, and integrative strategy is necessary, incorporating collaborative editing and explanatory glasses. This highlights the need for further research on audience reception in multicultural news settings, joint bilingual editorial processes, and Taylor translator training for effective multilingual journalism.

Keywords : Political idioms, Relevance theory, Polysystem theory.