Layers of linguocultural transfer: translation, terminology and linguopoetics in the German–French–Uzbek triangle

Abstract On closer inspection, three operations that translation studies, terminology and linguopoetics have traditionally separated out prove to be variants of the same phenomenon: the negotiation of culturally indexed meaning across linguistic boundaries. Drawing on a deliberately heterogeneous corpus – German renderings of Babur’s Boburnoma , French and Uzbek sport vocabulary (including football tactical neologisms and the lexis of belt-wrestling and pétanque) and hydropoetonyms and phono-graphostylistic markers across German, French and Uzbek literary tradition – the article argues that these three domains operate as interlocking layers of a single transfer mechanism rather than as parallel descriptive fields. The argument is based on an extension of frame-semantic geometry: each transferred unit can be placed on a nucleus–periphery gradient and the depth of its cultural anchoring determines whether it will be preserved, naturalised or stripped of its meaning in the transfer. Uzbek turns out to be a language that imports sport vocabulary wholesale and exports culture-bound lexemes ( kurash, halol, gʻirrom ) that are resistant to translation; French shows a greater normative pressure to indigenise loans; German Boburnoma translation favours descriptive paraphrase, trading periphery for referential clarity. Hydropoetonyms are in a third position, in which the prosodic-phonetic substrate of the source is structurally untransferable. The suggestion, which challenges a branch of translation studies that continues to think in terms of word-for-word equivalence, is that adequacy should be evaluated based on a multi-layered model where the terminology, poetic form and cultural references are co-constitutive.

Hali tarjima qilinmagan