Background: The translation of classical Urdu ghazals into English presents one of the most formidable challenges in literary translation, given the form's dependence on a dense intertextual web of Sufi mystical philosophy, cultural allusion, Arabic and Persian loanwords, and prosodic conventions that have no direct equivalents in the English literary tradition.

Objective: This study examines the translational strategies employed in selected English renderings of canonical Urdu ghazals by Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, analysing the ideological, cultural, and pragmatic dimensions of translational loss and gain through the frameworks of Eugene Nida's dynamic equivalence, Lawrence Venuti's domestication/foreignisation dichotomy, and Antoine Berman's deforming tendencies.

Method: A qualitative comparative translation analysis was conducted on a corpus of twelve ghazals (four per poet) alongside two published English translations of each, totalling 24 translation texts. Analysis focused on lexical, prosodic, pragmatic, and ideological dimensions of translational decision-making.

Key Results: All examined translations exhibit a strong tendency toward domestication and dynamic equivalence, resulting in systematic pragmatic losses in the domains of Sufi theological resonance, prosodic aesthetic experience, and intertextual Perso-Arabic cultural memory. Foreignising strategies, employed sparingly, produce semantically richer but less poetically fluent renderings.