Cross-linguistic Equivalence in the Translation Ofsomatic Phraseological Units: a Comparative Study of English and Uzbek
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article is the third in a series examining how English idiomatic expressions are rendered into Uzbek, following companion studies of general idioms and of business and economic idioms , and it turns to a subclass those studies had flagged but not examined in depth: somatic phraseological units (SPUs), idioms built on body-part vocabulary such as head, heart, hand, eye, and tongue. Drawing on two detailed empirical studies of English-Uzbek somatic phraseology (Jumanazarov, 2025a, 2025b) together with recent work on connotative loss in somatic-idiom translation (Ruzikulova, 2025) and on the comparative structure of somatic phraseology across the two languages (Akhmedov, 2026), the article compiles a twenty-item bidirectional corpus of somatic idiom-translation pairs and codes it under the same five-strategy scheme used in the two companion studies. Full equivalence is found to be markedly more frequent for somatic idioms (45%) than for general idioms (10%) or business idioms (16.7%), a pattern consistent with the view, associated with embodied-cognition accounts of metaphor, that idioms grounded in shared bodily experience transfer across languages with less loss than idioms grounded in culturally local institutions or history. At the same time, the corpus documents systematic points of divergence, English and Uzbek do not always select the same body part to encode a given meaning (eye versus eye-and-ear for vigilance; tongue versus teeth for enforced silence), which the article analyses using Ruzikulova's (2025) three-way distinction between semantic distortion, pragmatic omission, and emotional-intensity shift. The article closes by arguing that somatic idioms, precisely because of their high but imperfect equivalence, offer an unusually clear window onto the balance between universal embodiment and language-specific metaphorical convention.
Source: HSR (London)
Author: Xasanova Durdona Adxam qizi
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225539479