A domestication and foreignization perspective on methods for translating cultural realia into English in Uzbek children’s literature

Abstract

Cultural authenticity and reader comprehension must be carefully balanced in children’s literature, making the translation of cultural realia a major difficulty in literary translation. Many cultural distinctive elements included in Uzbek children’s books, such as traditions, rituals, cuisine, attire and social practices frequently have no exact English equivalents. The domestication and foreignization approaches put out by Venuti (199) are the main subject of this study, which investigates the methods utilized to translate cultural realia from Uzbek children’s literature into English. Fifty samples of cultural realia chosen from Uzbek folktales and children’s stories were subjected to a qualitative content analysis. To ascertain the frequency and efficacy of each approach, the detected elements were grouped based on the translation strategy used. The results show that 36% of the cases involved domestication and 64% involved foreignization. The findings imply that despite introducing English-speaking readers to Uzbek culture, translators typically favor maintaining the cultural distinctiveness of the original text.