It is Glory to Die Doing One's Duty

 

First a disclaimer: I have very little knowledge of the Bhagvad Gita, but lately, I have taken up reading The Gita (and trying to understand The Gita) in earnest. 

The motto of my Regiment, The MADRAS Regiment, is the following:

स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेय: 

swa-dharme nidhanaṁ śhreyaḥ

It is taken from Verse 35, Chapter 3, of Bhagavad Gita. The full verse is thus:

श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुण: परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात् |

स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेय: परधर्मो भयावह: || 35||

śhreyān swa-dharmo viguṇaḥ para-dharmāt sv-anuṣhṭhitāt

swa-dharme nidhanaṁ śhreyaḥ para-dharmo bhayāvahaḥ

In the Regiment, the English translation of the motto is:

It is Glory to Die Doing One's Duty.

स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेय:  along with its English translation, 'It is Glory to Die Doing One's Duty' is prominently displayed in the Quarter Guards of all MADRAS Regiment units.

In my humble opinion, this translation is not correct, indeed it is misleading.

Two well known Gita translations: One, Gita As It Is by Swami Prabhupada, and two, The Holy Geeta by Prabha Duneja give respectively the following translation of Verse 35, Chapter 3:

This, some may say, is the Bharatiya perspective. But, the thing is that even a Western perspective, like the one given by Winthrop Sargeant in his book 'The Bhagavad Gita', writes the translation of the verse similarly:

There are some who have said that the translation may have been done to give a motivational tilt to the motto. In my humble opinion, a totally unrelated translation to fill in the purported contour of motivation is ill conceived. One cannot incorrectly translate verses from the Bhagvad Gita, however motivational the translation may appear.

We must change the translation of the line in question to the one that is given in well known books giving English translations of  Bhagvad Gita.