Pragmatic Problems of Audiovisual Translation from Russian into Uzbek: Romantic Comedy Love and Pigeons

The practical aspects of audiovisual translation within the context of Russian and Uzbek linguistic cultures remain understudied. This article examines some pragmatic issues in the Uzbek dubbing of the Russian film Love and Pigeons. Audiovisual works are translated as multimodal texts subject to specific technical and time constraints. Translators must pre-assess the source cultural information regarding its acceptability for the target culture, deciding on censorship requirements to prevent culture shock among the target audience. The analysis of the Uzbek adaptation of Love and Pigeons revealed several key pragmatic challenges: idiomatic expressions, formal versus informal modes of address, sociolinguistic adaptation, divergent values, and character speech portraits. The absence of direct equivalents for certain dialectal and colloquial words in the Uzbek language frequently distorts these speech portraits. Consequently, the inability to reproduce specific idiolectal preferences led to a loss of the characters’ unique speech profiles. While some forms of address were adapted to Uzbek cultural norms, others were retained to avoid over-domestication. Ultimately, pragmatic problems in audiovisual translation from Russian into Uzbek extend beyond the issues of polymodality or technical constraints, as they are further complicated by a significant linguacultural gap.