Reconstructing Meaning Across Cultures: The Kazakh and English Kutadgu Bilig in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This study offers a comparative examination of the Kazakh and English translations of Kutadgu Bilig, an eleventh-century didactic poem composed by the Turkic scholar Yusuf Balasaguni. Grounded in Descriptive Translation Studies and current frameworks of cultural translation, the research approaches both translations as autonomous interpretive texts shaped by the norms and expectations of their respective target cultures, rather than measuring them against the medieval source. The analysis centers on core philosophical and ethical concepts – justice, fortune, intellect, the ultimate purpose of human life, law and custom (törü), modesty as a guardian of personhood (uyat), and active virtue (edgülük) – alongside Qur'anic allusions and culturally specific idiomatic expressions. The results reveal that the English translation tends toward the universalization of philosophical content and the segmentation of unified Turkic-Islamic concepts into clusters of narrower, register-specific terms, situating the work within an ethical framework accessible to a global readership. The Kazakh translation, by contrast, preserves these concepts as unified conceptual nodes and sustains religious depth and culturally embedded meaning, maintaining the text's connection to the Turkic-Islamic intellectual heritage. The study concludes that translation constitutes an act of cultural interpretation rather than mere linguistic transference, fundamentally reshaping the philosophical and ideological dimensions of classical works.