Translating Cultural Images in Yu Hua’s To Live: English and Uzbek Perspectives

Abstract

This article examines how culturally situated images associated with Yu Hua’s To Live can be approached in English and Uzbek literary translation. It treats a cultural image as a relation between a concrete referent, its social associations, and its function within a narrative. The study combines a focused review of translation theory with qualitative analysis of selected translation problems: the title, personal names, the ox, agrarian social status, material culture, and political terminology. Michael Berry’s English translation provides a bibliographic point of reference, while the Uzbek discussion offers explicitly proposed renderings rather than quotations from an unexamined published translation. The analysis argues that lexical familiarity does not by itself preserve cultural meaning. A familiar Uzbek expression can assist comprehension while introducing associations absent from the Chinese setting; retention can preserve a referent while leaving its narrative significance unclear. The article therefore proposes context-sensitive selection among retention, descriptive rendering, and limited explanation. Its contribution is a transparent framework for distinguishing cultural accessibility from cultural substitution. The conclusions are interpretive propositions for subsequent testing against aligned Chinese, English, and Uzbek passages, not measured findings about translation frequency or reader response.