The article explores the linguistic and cultural difficulties that arise when translating craftsmanship realia between English and Uzbek. Craftsmanship realia—names of traditional tools, materials, techniques, workplace practices and stylistic conventions—constitute a densely allusive lexical stratum that encodes the technological history and value systems of artisanal communities. Accurate transfer is complicated by the absence of direct equivalents, the coexistence of multiple in-culture synonyms, and strong connotative overtones. The study integrates a 512 436-word parallel corpus of museum catalogues, UNESCO nomination files, export documents, tourist brochures and academic monographs with semi-structured interviews of fifteen professional translators. A five-value taxonomy—borrowing, phonological adaption, descriptive translation, functional substitution and omission—guides the coding of 1 116 realia pairs. Quantitative analysis shows that descriptive translation dominates, accounting for 56 percent of Uzbek-to-English and 44 percent of English-to-Uzbek renderings, expanding text length by an average of 43 percent and increasing terminological drift. Borrowing appears mainly with high-visibility artefacts (“ikat”, “suzani”, “pichoq”), whereas functional substitution prevails in promotional genres targeting non-specialists. Interview data confirm that house-style guidelines, audience expectations and fear of misinterpretation drive domestication. The article proposes a salience-based hybrid model that calibrates borrowing, description and supplementation according to ethnographic prominence and communicative function. Recommendations include a bilingual terminological database, integrated visual glossing for museums and a training module on craft heritage for translators.

Craftsmanship realia, translation equivalence, English–Uzbek bilingual corpus, ethnolinguistics

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