Strategies of Cultural Translation in Urun Kuhzod’s Очаи Бачаҳо (The Mother of the House) into English
Abstract
This study investigates the strategies of cultural translation employed in the English adaptation of Urun Kuhzod's Tajik short story "The Mother of the House" (Очаи Бачаҳо), applying Peter Newmark's theoretical framework of cultural typologies and translation procedures. The study employs a descriptive qualitative research design in which culture-specific lexical units are extracted from the Tajik source text and systematically compared with their English target text equivalents. The findings reveal four main categories of Tajik cultural expressions in the original text: material culture, ecology, organizations and ideas, and gestures and habits/social culture. The analysis of the translation demonstrates that the translator employed transference, functional equivalent, cultural equivalent, literal/ through-translation, descriptive equivalent, componential analysis, and omission procedures. The use of these procedures produces a dual effect: a foreignized domestic interior of the house that preserves Tajik cultural authenticity and an accessible exterior of the house that facilitates target reader comprehension. Furthermore, the systematic neutralization of Soviet-era institutional terms and the omission of culturally embedded micro-rituals transform a historically specific social critique into a universalized narrative of rural hardship. These findings contribute to the understudied field of Tajik English literary translation and highlight how micro-linguistic choices shape the cultural and ideological representation of Tajik identity for international audience.