A Critical Review of the Book “Language, Mind and Culture: A Practical Introduction”

Because of its clear presentation of topics, comprehensive scope and its illustrative application of theories, “Language, Mind and Culture: A Practical Introduction” by Zoltán Kövecses has secured its place as a textbook of Cognitive Linguistics. That is why the book has been translated into Persian. However, its erroneous Persian translation has not managed to preserve the original book’s merits and has sometimes misinformed or even misled the reader. Most of the problems with the Persian translation constitute formal defects, including conspicuous misspellings and wrong equivalents for proper nouns, and content mistakes, including wrong renderings of general and technical terms and incorrect translations that produced vague or even unintelligible sentences. After giving a broad outline of the original and its contents, the present review has enumerated the various types of the defects in its Persian translation with numerous examples in order to illustrate and correct some of its critical flaws and also to put forward a proposal for the total revision of the translation.