A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF CULTURE-SPECIFIC TERMS IN ANGLOPHONE AND CENTRAL ASIAN NARRATIVES

Abstract

This research undertakes a systematic contrastive analysis of culture- specific terms (CSTs) in Anglophone and Central Asian literary narratives, examining how linguistically and culturally bound lexical items reflect distinct worldview systems. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary novels and short stories from English, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz literary traditions, the study identifies, categorizes, and compares culturemes related to kinship, hospitality, spirituality, material culture, and social hierarchy. Employing Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation procedures alongside Newmark’s cultural categorization framework, the research reveals significant asymmetries in how cultural concepts are lexicalized and narratively embedded. Findings indicate that Central Asian narratives demonstrate higher density of collectivist culturemes with elaborate semantic fields around communal values, while Anglophone texts exhibit individualist culturemes with emphasis on personal autonomy. The study further demonstrates that untranslatability is not a linguistic deficit but a marker of cultural specificity requiring compensatory strategies such as calquing, functional equivalence, and explanatory expansion. This research contributes to comparative literature, contrastive linguistics, and translation studies by providing empirical evidence of how culture-specific terminology constructs narrative worlds and mediates intercultural understanding.