Q7: Urdu to English translation

Understanding the topic

This passage is a parable rather than an argument, and its meaning sits in its tone, so the translation has to preserve a storyteller's cadence as well as the sense of the words.

Model translation

The old man said that beyond the forest there stands a mountain on which grows the flower whose fragrance restores the light lost to the eyes. But the mountain is very high, and it is strewn with countless crags, with thorny scrub and with great boulders that block the way. Many have come to climb this mountain and many have gone away again, yet no one has ever come who reached the flower. Perhaps this is why there is sorrow and suffering in the world, and why man is still in search of the light.

How to handle a passage like this

Keep the parable's rhythm. The Urdu builds its obstacles in a list of three, crags, thorny scrub and boulders, and the repetition is doing work. The English keeps all three and repeats "with" to preserve the accumulation. Compressing them into "many obstacles" would be accurate and lifeless.

Do not explain the ending. The last sentence turns from the story to a reflection on human life, and it does so without warning or commentary. Adding a phrase such as "the moral of this is" would destroy the effect the passage was built to produce.

Watch the tenses. The old man's speech is reported, but the mountain is described in the present, because it is presented as still standing. Shifting everything into the past would be a defensible choice, yet it loses the sense that the flower is still there and still unreached.