Functional Criteria for Preserving National Colour and Cultural Adaptation in Literary Translation

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of balancing the preservation of national colour in literary translation with cultural adaptation for the target audience. National colour is treated not as a collection of isolated realia but as a systemic cultural layer created through material objects, social institutions, kinship and address forms, rituals, traditional food and clothing, phraseology and speech etiquette. Drawing on the theoretical work of G. Salomov, Q. Musayev, P. Newmark, J.F. Aixelá, L. Venuti and C. Nord, the study combines descriptive, comparative and functional-pragmatic analysis. Uzbek culture-specific units such as mahalla, oqsoqol, kelin salom, hashar, sumalak, do‘ppi, non and choyxona are used to evaluate transliteration, explication, descriptive translation, functional equivalents and partial adaptation. The article proposes a functional decision model based on cultural load, narrative relevance, recurrence, contextual inferability and stylistic function. The model is intended to preserve cultural identity without producing either excessive domestication or reader-alienating exoticization.