TRANSLINGUA

An Analysis of Difficulties and Complexities in Translating English Idioms into Urdu Language

Kokub Khurshid — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Translation is the method of converting linguistic structures and aspects of a source language into another language culturally, semantically and pragmatically. The present study aims to explore and analyze the challenges encountered in the process of translating English idioms into Urdu language, and to identify the translation strategies used in Urdu translation of English idioms. The form of this research is qualitative descriptive and data has been collected mainly from the speeches of native speakers and various internet resources. The findings revealed that idiomatic expressions may not have direct equivalent in Urdu, requiring creative adaptation to convey the intended meaning effectively. Researching the challenges related to cultural difference would help you gain better understanding of how idioms reflect cultural values, attitude and experiences.

AI-Driven Lexicography: Building Intelligent Urdu Dictionaries Using NLP

Ijaz Hussain Ijaz, Ms Sarwat Suhail — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of this study is to develop fully featured lexical databases for relatively low-resource languages such as Urdu presents researchers with persistent difficulties, particularly due to the language’s intricate morphology, limited high-quality training data, and the rapid evolution of how speakers use the language online. This paper introduces an AI-driven framework aimed at creating adaptive, smart Urdu dictionaries by harnessing state-of-the-art NLP processes including lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, word sense disambiguation, and synthetic data generation. To feed the system, the authors assembled a multi-domain corpus that pulls together formal literary material, user-generated social media posts, and code-mixed Roman Urdu examples; all of this text was then run through a transformer pipeline specifically fine-tuned to capture Urdu’s linguistic characteristics. As a result, the dictionary now covers 92.3 per cent of academic and newspaper vocabulary as well as 87.6 per cent of more casual or spoken expressions, with the associated NLP tools reporting impressive F1 scores of 93.5 for lemmatization, 94.8 for POS tagging, and 91.3 for WSD. Further testing on practical applications such as machine translation where scores reached 32.4—and sentiment classification, which clocked an F1 of 88.6, revealed clear performance gains over previously established benchmarks. Feedback collected from Urdu language experts and everyday users praised both the system’s accuracy and overall usability, although they also pointed to a need for broader representation of regional dialects. When compared to earlier research, the present framework marks a significant step forward in Urdu lexicography by blending contextual word embeddings with live, continually updating data streams, thereby offering a model that is scalable and relevant to other under-resourced tongues. These results highlight the power of AI-enhanced dictionary making to bolster linguistic variety while expanding the horizons of NLP tools designed for Urdu in an increasingly digital world.

Challenging Dictatorship through Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s Speech in The Great Dictator

Mudassir Inam Mudassir Inam, Amjad, Insha Ullah — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

ABSTRACT

The present study deals a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s climactic address in the Great Dictator (1940) to examine how the speech challenges dictatorship and war, constructs a discourse of peace and humanity, and reflects its WWII context. We transcribe the speech and code clause-by-clause for DHA strategies—nomination/predication of social actors, argumentation via topoi (danger, responsibility, usefulness, justice, history), perspectivization (deixis/footing), and intensification/mitigation—integrated with Systemic Functional Linguistics for transitivity and modality, and with metaphor/framing diagnostics. Findings show systematic delegitimation of authoritarian power: rulers are de-charismatized (“machine men”) while “you, the people” are re-authorized as ethical agents through transitivity choices that cast citizens—not leaders—as Actors in material processes. The speech repurposes conventional wartime warrants (danger, duty) so that must encode moral obligation to protect the vulnerable, and resemanticizes mobilization (fight) as civic, nonviolent action. Inclusive you dixies, anaphora and antithesis, and master metaphors (machine vs. human; light vs. darkness) organize a persuasive moral grammar that privileges dignity over domination. Historically, references to radio and aeroplanes reframe modern technology as solidarity-enabling, while a hopeful now/soon/tomorrow temporality resists fatalism. Conceptually, the study specifies how a humanist counter-discourse can be operationalized in language; methodologically, it demonstrates the payoffs of DHA triangulation on a canonical cultural text.

Keywords: Discourse-Historical Approach, critical discourse analysis, Chaplin, the Great Dictator, authoritarianism, framing, metaphor, transitivity, modality, WWII rhetoric.

A Postcolonial Study of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and The Wandering Falcon

Ayesha Hassan — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The present study is a postcolonial investigation of selected short stories by Daniyal Mueenudin’s (2009) In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Jamal Ahmed’s (2011) The Wandering Falcon. The selected short stories under study from Mueenudin’s collection are In other rooms, other wonders, Nawabdin Electrician, Saleema, and Provide, provide. While the selected short stories from Ahmed’s collection are The Sin of the Mother, The Mullah, The Betrothal of Shah Zarina, and A Point of Honour. The present study examines the nature and ways of male and female representations in selected stories and contextualizes it to the broader field of postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial literary criticism provides significant frames to analyze nature of representation in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It attempts to reveal the image these representations produce and how far these constructions reinforce stereotypical notions. Postcolonial writings by native writers are considered self-representations and these representations formulate identities of formerly colonized people in their sociocultural context. These sociocultural constructed identities subvert or reinforce stereotypical notions. For the purpose to reveal the nature of male and female representation in Postcolonial context the selected short stories were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) model of thematic analysis. The investigation led to conclude that stereotypical notions regarding males and females are reinforced in the selected short stories. The portrayal of female characters suggests that females appear as victim of societal norms, and male power and authority. While male characters are represented in terms of masculinity and positional superiority. The selected texts share thematic similarities and these representations, do not construct a positive image and portray pre-formed identities of female and male in Pakistani society.