TRANSLATING TERMS IN THE SEMANTIC FIELD OF MA’NAVIYAT IN LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article examines translation relations involving terms and terminological expressions in the semantic field of ma’naviyat within formal legal and institutional public discourse. The material consists of the Uzbek and English versions of the Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan and two language versions of an official report published on 19 January 2021. Six short pairs of expressions purposively selected from these documents are compared through contextual, componential, and pragmatic analysis. The analysis distinguishes correspondence in lexical form, conceptual scope, discourse function, and genre appropriateness. It identifies functional differences between the preamble and normative articles of the legal text and examines explanatory renderings of expressions associated with ma’naviyat in the official report. The observations provide a qualitative description of selected contexts rather than a statistical generalisation about entire genres. The article recommends avoiding the automatic classification of translation variants as either errors or fully equivalent renderings, recording document genre separately from internal discourse acts, and formulating hypotheses for testing in a broader parallel corpus.