“The Baburnama” the sixteenth-century Chagatai Turkish memoirs of Babur is distinguished among pre-modern Central Asian prose narratives by the density and variety of its emotional and expressive means: exclamatory constructions, evaluative epithets, rhetorical questions, hyperbole, terms of endearment, religious invocations, and embedded verse. This article examines how English translations of the Baburnama by John Leyden and William Erskine (1826), Annette S. Beveridge (1921), and Wheeler M. Thackston (1996) render this emotive layer of the source text, and what translation strategies underlie the degree of equivalence achieved. Drawing on the equivalence frameworks of Nida, Koller, and Baker, and on Vinay and Darbelnet’s inventory of translation procedures, the study applies a qualitative comparative-contrastive discourse analysis to a purposive corpus of emotionally charged excerpts (bereavement, homesickness, illness, battle, and exile episodes). The findings show a diachronic shift from source-distancing, domesticating strategies in the nineteenth-century translation toward increasingly source-oriented, semantically dense strategies in Beveridge, and toward communicatively fluent, dynamic-equivalence-oriented strategies in Thackston. Devices such as interjections and rhetorical questions are the most resistant to full equivalence, while embedded poetry and religious forms are most often compensated for through footnoting or explicitation. The article argues that no single strategy secures both semantic and emotive equivalence simultaneously, and that a combination of compensation, modulation, and contextual explicitation offers the most reliable path to preserving the expressive force of the original for the modern reader.