Translation strategies for culture-bound units in Chinese spring festival greetings into Uzbek

Abstract

This article examines the translation of culture-bound units found in Chinese Spring Festival (春节) greetings into Uzbek from semantic, pragmatic, and intercultural perspectives. Particular attention is paid to the extent to which the lexical meanings and the associative, symbolic, and communicative content of such expressions as 福, 吉祥, 团圆, 万事如意, 年年有余, and 恭喜发财 can be preserved in Uzbek. The theoretical framework draws on the approaches of functional equivalence, domestication, and foreignization. The greeting formulas included in a 60-unit working corpus compiled for the study are classified into semantic-pragmatic groups, and the strategies of literal translation, functional substitution, explanatory translation, and combined translation are compared. The analysis demonstrates that lexical correspondence alone is insufficient when translating Chinese festive greetings into Uzbek. The addressee, communicative situation, cultural symbols, and conventional greeting formulas in Uzbek must also be taken into account. For expressions with a strong cultural component, functional equivalents supplemented by brief explanations where necessary provide an effective solution, whereas natural Uzbek greeting formulas are suitable for conveying wishes with universal meanings.