Grammatical and Syntactic Transformations in the Translation of Short News Items of Higher Education Institutions between Uzbek and English

Abstract

The article examines grammatical and syntactic transformations observed in the translation of short news items of higher education institutions between Uzbek and English. The material consists of the Uzbek and English versions of news published in 2025 on the official websites of four universities and institutes. The study describes sentence splitting, the conversion of participial modifiers into relative clauses, voice shifts, and the rendering of verbal nouns through verbal and gerundial constructions. It also considers the omission of information, the use of generalizing units, and changes in modal and temporal meaning. The findings show that a substantial restructuring of a sentence does not necessarily affect its content, whereas a minor modal or tense difference may alter the pragmatic meaning of a message. The article proposes three criteria for evaluating such transformations: semantic accuracy, factual completeness, and pragmatic equivalence. It is also noted that, when only finished texts are compared, the cause of a change cannot be reliably established.