COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ECOTOURISM TERMS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK: TRANSLATION AND EQUIVALENCE ISSUES

Ecotourism has expanded rapidly as a global practice and as a policy discourse, producing a dense network of specialized terms related to conservation, visitor management, community benefits, and sustainable mobility. Because English dominates international tourism communication, many ecotourism concepts enter other languages through translation, borrowing, or hybridization. In Uzbek, the growth of the ecotourism sector and environmental communication has intensified the need for terminological clarity, consistency, and functional equivalence—especially in legislation, destination branding, guide training, and academic writing. This article examines ecotourism terminology in English and Uzbek with a focus on translation and equivalence issues. Using a cognitive-semantic and terminological perspective, the study analyzes (i) structural types of ecotourism terms (single-word, compounds, multiword units, and acronym-based units), (ii) dominant equivalence relations (full, partial, and zero equivalence), and (iii) translation strategies used to render English terms into Uzbek (borrowing, calque, descriptive translation, functional substitution, and mixed strategies). The results show that the most frequent difficulty arises from multiword English terms with embedded conceptual relations (e.g., management, impact, and ethics frameworks) that do not map neatly onto Uzbek phrase structure without either explicitation or restructuring. Partial equivalence is common where Uzbek uses broader, culturally familiar concepts (e.g., tabiat turizmi) while English distinguishes narrower categories. The discussion proposes a practical guideline set for translators, lexicographers, and tourism stakeholders to standardize term formation, reduce ambiguity, and preserve communicative function across genres.