SEMANTIC SHIFTS IN THE TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL REALIA: EVIDENCE FROM ENGLISH - UZBEK LITERARY TRANSLATION

Abstract

The translation of cultural realia represents one of the most complex areas of literary translation because culture-bound lexical units encode not only denotative information but also historical, social, institutional, material, and symbolic meanings. Although previous research has extensively examined the strategies used to render realia, comparatively less attention has been devoted to the semantic consequences produced by those strategies in English–Uzbek literary translation. The present study investigates semantic shifts occurring in the translation of cultural realia through a comparative analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Abdulla Qodiriy’s Mehrobdan Chayon (The Scorpion from the Altar), with particular attention to the English translation by I. M. Tuxtasinov. The study employs comparative textual analysis, contextual-semantic analysis, classification, and descriptive quantitative procedures. Cultural realia are examined according to the relationship between their source-text semantic structure and their translated representation. The analysis distinguishes semantic preservation, specification, generalization, cultural substitution, semantic modification, reduction, explicitation, and cultural-semantic loss. The findings demonstrate that translation procedures cannot be evaluated solely by their formal correspondence to source-language units: the same procedure may preserve one semantic component while weakening another. Particularly significant are cases involving historically marked social titles and institutional vocabulary, where a target-language equivalent may communicate the general referent while reducing its historical or sociocultural specificity. The study argues that semantic-shift analysis provides a more precise account of cultural transfer than a strategy-based classification alone. The research contributes to English–Uzbek translation studies by connecting the established study of realia with semantic transformation and by emphasizing the preservation of multidimensional cultural meaning.

Keywords

cultural realia; semantic shift; semantic transformation; literary translation; English–Uzbek translation; cultural-specific items; cultural meaning; translation equivalence; Mehrobdan Chayon.