THE UNTRANSLATABILITY OF CULTURAL METAPHOR: CHALLENGES IN LITERARY TRANSLATION FROM ENGLISH INTO UZBEK

This article examines the phenomenon of cultural metaphor untranslatability in the context of literary translation from English into Uzbek. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory as developed by Lakoff and Johnson, as well as on Venuti's domestication and foreignization framework, the study investigates how culturally embedded metaphorical expressions in Anglophone literary texts resist equivalent rendering in Uzbek. Through close analysis of selected passages from Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Toni Morrison's Beloved, the article identifies three principal categories of translational difficulty: cognitive domain mismatch, cultural-conceptual lacunae, and pragmatic loss of connotative meaning. The findings suggest that translators working between English and Uzbek must deploy a combination of compensatory and explanatory strategies to preserve the cognitive and emotional functions of the source metaphors, and that neither pure domestication nor pure foreignization constitutes a universally adequate solution. The article contributes to ongoing debates in translation studies concerning the limits of equivalence and the ethical responsibilities of the literary translator.