Translating Culture-Bound and Religious Expressions in Toba Tek Singh: A Skopos-Based Corpus Study

Abstract

Culture-bound and religious expressions in Urdu carry layers of historical memory, emotional depth, and communal identity that are not easily reproduced in English. Although these expressions have been discussed within broader translation studies, limited research has examined them through a small-scale corpus-based lens in connection with the translator’s purpose. Previous studies either emphasize linguistic equivalence or cultural description in isolation, but very few investigate how Skopos Theory shapes translator decision-making when rendering culturally dense Urdu expressions into English. Therefore, the current study aims to explore how meaning shifts occur during the translation of twenty selected culture-bound and religious expressions from Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, using Khalid Hasan’s English translation as the target text. A mini parallel corpus was manually constructed, and expressions were analyzed qualitatively to identify semantic, emotional, and cultural changes. Hans Vermeer’s Skopos Theory was applied to understand how the translator’s purpose particularly the goal of making the narrative accessible to an international readership influenced choices such as paraphrasing, simplification, domestication, and cultural generalization. The analysis revealed that expressions associated with religious devotion, cultural identity, and emotionally charged forms of address exhibited the greatest degree of meaning loss, largely due to strategic decisions aligned with the skopos of clarity and readability. The findings highlight that translator agency, guided by purpose, plays a central role in shaping how culturally embedded meanings survive or transform in the target text.