Translation Issues Of Craftsmanship Realia In English And Uzbek

The article explores the linguistic and cultural difficulties that arise when translating craftsmanship realia between English and Uzbek. Craftsmanship realia—names of traditional tools, materials, techniques, workplace practices and stylistic conventions—constitute a densely allusive lexical stratum that encodes the technological history and value systems of artisanal communities. Accurate transfer is complicated by the absence of direct equivalents, the coexistence of multiple in-culture synonyms, and strong connotative overtones. The study integrates a 512 436-word parallel corpus of museum catalogues, UNESCO nomination files, export documents, tourist brochures and academic monographs with semi-structured interviews of fifteen professional translators. A five-value taxonomy—borrowing, phonological adaption, descriptive translation, functional substitution and omission—guides the coding of 1 116 realia pairs. Quantitative analysis shows that descriptive translation dominates, accounting for 56 percent of Uzbek-to-English and 44 percent of English-to-Uzbek renderings, expanding text length by an average of 43 percent and increasing terminological drift. Borrowing appears mainly with high-visibility artefacts (“ikat”, “suzani”, “pichoq”), whereas functional substitution prevails in promotional genres targeting non-specialists. Interview data confirm that house-style guidelines, audience expectations and fear of misinterpretation drive domestication. The article proposes a salience-based hybrid model that calibrates borrowing, description and supplementation according to ethnographic prominence and communicative function. Recommendations include a bilingual terminological database, integrated visual glossing for museums and a training module on craft heritage for translators.