THE NATURE OF STYLISTIC ADAPTATION IN LITERARY TRANSLATION: ON THE EXAMPLE OF FRENCH–UZBEK TRANSLATIONS

This article investigates the mechanisms and typology of stylistic adaptation employed in the French-to-Uzbek literary translation of two significant historical narratives: Marcel Brion’s Tamerlan and Lucien Kehren’s Tamerlan: l’empire du Seigneur de Fer, both rendered into Uzbek by the translator B. Ermatov. Drawing on contrastive stylistic analysis and descriptive translation studies, the study examines how lexical, syntactic and rhetorical elements of the source texts are transformed in the target-language versions to meet the aesthetic and cultural expectations of an Uzbek readership. A corpus of 120 aligned source–target segments was compiled and coded against a purpose-built taxonomy. The findings indicate that stylistic adaptation is not a peripheral corrective measure but a constitutive dimension of the translation process, governed by both linguistic constraints and cultural pragmatics. The article proposes a three-tier framework of stylistic adaptation — compensatory, integrative and neutralizing — and illustrates each category with textual examples drawn from the corpora under investigation.