Translation of Culture-Specific Realia in Abdulla Qodiriy’s “Oʻtkan Kunlar” (Strategies, Challenges and Cultural Adequacy)
Abstract
Culture-specific vocabulary constitutes one of the most persistent difficulties in literary translation because lexical units associated with material culture, social practices, clothing, food, and traditional institutions frequently lack direct equivalents in the target language. This study examines the English translation of selected culture-specific realia in Abdulla Qodiriy’s Oʻtkan kunlar (Bygone Days), with particular attention to Mark E. Reese’s English rendering. The study focuses on a selected group of ethnographic and material-culture items, including samovarchi, choyxona, shirmoy non, yakhtak, qala kovush, and belbogʻ. A qualitative comparative textual approach is employed to examine the relationship between source-language form, translation procedure, semantic adequacy, explanatory supplementation, stylistic naturalness, and retention of cultural specificity. The analysis combines concepts from realia translation studies with the foreignisation–domestication framework. The findings indicate that no single translation procedure adequately represents all dimensions of the selected realia. Direct retention may preserve cultural marking but can reduce immediate accessibility, whereas functional substitution may improve readability at the cost of cultural specificity. Within the selected corpus, transliteration combined with a concise explanatory gloss provides a relatively balanced solution when the source item has no established English equivalent. The study further argues that cultural adequacy should be assessed not only through lexical correspondence but also through the preservation of the item's cultural function, historical associations, and degree of markedness. The article contributes to the study of Uzbek–English literary translation by proposing a criteria-based approach to evaluating culture-specific lexical transfer in Qodiriy’s novel.
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References
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