CHALLENGES OF ADAPTING CULTURAL REALIA IN LITERARY TRANSLATION

• Akhmadaliyeva Rukhshona Mukhammadjonovna

  Fourth- year student, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University Branch in Tashkent

 This article examines the challenge of rendering cultural realia in literary translation, arguing that such items are not merely lexical curiosities but condensed carriers of cultural meaning that require careful interpretative work. Cultural realia—names for foods, holidays, institutions, artefacts, social practices and idiomatic expressions that are specific to a given culture—frequently lack straightforward equivalents in a target language, which forces the translator to weigh competing priorities: fidelity to the source culture, clarity for the target reader, and maintenance of the original’s aesthetic effect. Drawing on established theorists in translation studies, the paper outlines the principal strategies used to treat realia (transliteration, calquing, descriptive rendering, functional substitution and hybrid solutions) and demonstrates their application and limits through a range of lived examples. Special attention is paid to idioms and phrasal verbs, which behave like cultural realia because their meanings cannot be deduced from component parts and because they index cultural assumptions. The discussion shows that literal renderings of such items often distort meaning and that effective translation therefore relies on culturally informed functional equivalents. The conclusion emphasizes the translator’s role as cultural mediator and calls for continued research into how globalization and digital communication are reshaping the reception and stabilization of realia in target cultures.

1.Barkhudarov, L. S. (1975). Language and translation: Issues of general and specific theory of translation. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya.

2.Garbovsky, N. K. (2004). Translation theory. Moscow: Moscow University Press.

3.Komissarov, V. N. (1990). Translation theory (linguistic aspects). Moscow: Vysshaya shkola.

4.Newmark, P. (1988). A textbook of translation. New York: Prentice Hall.

5.Vlahov, S., & Florin, S. (1980). Untranslatable in translation. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya.

• PDF

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are disseminated under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which licenses unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is appropriately cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.