Personal history: Urdu edition of Imran’s book in the offing

Seven of the ten chapters have already been translated.

LAHORE: Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf is set to publish an Urdu edition of Imran Khan’s recently launched Pakistan: A Personal History.

Seven out of the ten chapters of the book have already been translated, four by columist Haroonur Rashid and the rest by Ghulam Mustafa Mohyuddin.

PTI’s central information secretary Umer Sarfraz Cheema said the Urdu edition would very soon be available in markets. He said the work would help spread the party’s message.

He said once the book is available all over the country, people who had yet to get their hands on the party’s manifesto would have an understanding of what the PTI stood for.

About the publisher of the Urdu edition, Cheema said negotiations were underway with several publishing companies and one of them would be selected by the time the translation was complete.

He said the Urdu version was being published with permission from the publisher of the English edition of the book.

Talking to The Express Tribune about the project, Mohyuddin said: “In translating text from one language to another, one almost always faces some difficulty in finding the words that best capture the author’s intent. My first concern is to ensure that the message is not lost in translation,” he said.

Political analyst Dr Asim Allah Bukhsh said Rashid had great facility in Urdu. He recalled that he had earlier wrote a book on General Akhtar Abdur Rehman titled Fateh.

Dr Bukhsh said the book could potentially be read as a manifesto of the party as it contained Imran Khan’s views on the country and its history.

The party plans to initially publish 30,000 copies of the book but hopes it will run into more editions.

Launch ceremonies for the Urdu edition would be held in several cities of the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th,  2011.