COGNITIVE STRATEGIES OF TRANSLATING INTERTEXTUAL ELEMENTS FROM ENGLISH INTO UZBEK

Аннотация

Abstract: This article investigates the cognitive strategies employed by translators in rendering intertextual elements allusions, precedent names, precedent statements, and culturally marked quotations from English into Uzbek. Building on the relevance-theoretic model of translation as interpretive resemblance across differing cognitive environments, on Leppihalme’s typology of allusion-translation strategies, and on the theory of precedent phenomena and the national cognitive base, the study proposes a three-stage cognitive-pragmatic model of translator decision-making: (1) recognition of the intertextual marker in the source text; (2) assessment of the degree of overlap between the source and target cognitive bases; (3) selection of a translation strategy that balances contextual effect against processing effort for the target reader. Analysis of English literary excerpts containing intertextual elements, together with their Uzbek renderings, shows that translators do not choose strategies arbitrarily but follow a systematic hierarchy conditioned by cognitive-base overlap: transcultural and religiously shared allusions (e.g., figures common to both the Biblical and Qur’anic traditions) tend to undergo retention or minimal naturalization, whereas allusions rooted exclusively in the Greco-Roman or specifically Anglo-American canon more often require cognitive substitution, explicitation, generalization, or, in extreme cases, omission. These findings have direct implications for translator training and for the theory of cognitive translatology in the English–Uzbek language pair.