Abstract
This paper investigates homonymic features within English and Uzbek railway terminology and the translation difficulties these features generate. Homonymy — the coincidence of identical or near-identical form across semantically unrelated terms — is a structurally distinct problem from synonymy and polysemy, yet it has received comparatively little attention in technical translation research. Drawing on bilingual documentation produced by Uzbekistan Railways, international railway engineering standards, and a corpus of Uzbek-English technical texts, this study identifies three principal categories of railway-domain homonymy: inter-field homonyms, where a term carries one meaning in general language or another technical domain and a different meaning in railway engineering; intra-field homonyms, where the same form denotes distinct railway-specific referents depending on subdiscipline; and cross-linguistic formal homonyms, where English and Uzbek terms share a surface form — typically through shared borrowing from Russian or European languages — but have diverged in reference or scope. Each category is illustrated with documented examples, and the translational risks specific to each are analysed. Practical strategies for disambiguation, including contextual profiling, domain- scoped glossaries, and annotated translation memories, are evaluated. The findings are relevant for railway translators, technical terminographers, and practitioners involved in the development of Uzbek professional-language standards.References
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