Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failures in Translating Hospitality Concepts: Evidence from English And Uzbek Literary Discourse
Abstract
This paper investigates the phenomenon of cross-cultural pragmatic failures in translating hospitality concepts between English and Uzbek literary texts. Hospitality is not merely a communicative act but a deeply embedded cultural construct loaded with implicit social codes, honor systems, and ritual protocols. When translating literary discourse across typologically and culturally distinct languages, direct lexical transfer often triggers pragmatic failures sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic misalignments due to differing conceptual frameworks of host-guest dynamics. Utilizing a comparative, pragmatic, and translational methodology, this study analyzes literary excerpts to identify sources of pragmatic failure in rendering culture-bound hospitality units (e.g., specific terms of address, ritual invitations, and formulas of refusal or persistence). The findings demonstrate that resolving these failures requires dynamic equivalence and pragmatic adaptation rather than literal translation to preserve the aesthetic and cultural integrity of the source text.