Culture-Specific Units in the Kazakh, Russian, and English Versions of the Epic Novel "Abai Zholy": Peculiarities of Their Rendering in Translation

Abstract

Mukhtar Auezov's epic novel Abai Zholy occupies a canonical position in Kazakh literature and functions as a linguistic repository of nineteenth-century nomadic, pastoral, and social life on the Kazakh steppe. Because the novel is saturated with culture-specific units denoting dwellings, clothing, food, kinship structures, social ranks, and oral-folkloric genres, its translation history across Russian, prepared under close cultural contact during the Soviet period, and English, prepared for a distant international readership, offers a productive site for examining how culturally embedded lexis is rendered across culturally distant target languages. This article presents a qualitative comparative-textual analysis of culture-specific units drawn from the Kazakh original of Abai Zholy alongside its canonical Russian and English translations, extending prior corpus-based findings on color and animal terminology to the broader categories of material culture, social organization, and oral-folkloric genre. Drawing on the classical Russian tradition of realia studies alongside Western frameworks for culture-specific items, the analysis classifies the translation procedures applied in each target language and compares their relative frequency and communicative effect. Findings indicate that the Russian translation achieves markedly higher lexical and connotative fidelity for material-culture and kinship terms, owing to documented Russian-Kazakh contact and established loanwords, whereas the English translation relies more heavily on domestication, explicitation, and occasional omission, particularly for hierarchical and folkloric-performative units lacking a ready equivalent. These patterns generalize beyond domains previously examined through corpus tools and carry implications for ongoing state-sponsored retranslation initiatives aimed at global literary dissemination. The article concludes by proposing a typological framework for future study of culture-specific translation in Kazakh literary heritage.