OVERCOMING LINGUISTIC CHALLENGES IN UZBEK – ENGLISH AI TRANSLATION: A STUDY OF FILM REVIEW DISCOURSE

Authors

  • abdurauf abdurauf School No. 181
  • Amutha Amalraj School No. 181
  • Manzura Maxmaraximova School No. 181

Abstract

This study was prompted by a simple question about the best tools for translation for an English lesson on films for pre-intermediate Uzbek learners. Based on this enquiry this paper explores difficulties faced in Uzbek-to- English translation specifically within the framework of film review discourse. It explores translation generated across four tools. Two from Neural Machine Translation (NMT) Google Translate, Yandex Translate and two from Large Language Models (LLMs) ChatGPT and Gemini. Reviews of six Uzbek films from authentic sources were analyzed and based on the expert input from an Uzbek language specialist this study identified failure types in terms of use of idioms, cultural terminology, register maintenance and overall cohesion. The paper concludes with a recommendation based on multi-layered intervention approach that integrate Skopos - based human editing and glossaries with human interventions to facilitate translation accuracy, especially for low resource languages.

References

1. Abiyatova, M. M. (2025). Skopos theory in translation. Samarkand State Institute of Foreign Languages.

2. Al Salem, M. N., Alghazo, S., et al. (2026). How AI translation personas reframe diplomatic texts. Studies in Media and Communication. (January 2026)

3. Berman, A. (1985). Translation and the trials of the foreign. In L. Venuti (Ed. & Trans.), The translation studies reader (pp. 276–289). Routledge.

4. Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., … Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, 1877–1901.

5. Court, S., & Elsner, M. (2024). Shortcomings of LLMs for low-resource translation: Retrieval and understanding are both the problem. ACL Anthology.

6. Feng, C. (2025). Analysis of semantic deviation in AI translation and linguistic optimization paths. International Scientific Technical and Economic Research. (June 2025)

7. Goddard, C. (2020). Overcoming the linguistic challenges for ethno-epistemology. [Book chapter]. (May 2020)

8. Joshi, P., Santy, S., Budhiraja, A., Bali, K., & Choudhury, M. (2020). The state and fate of linguistic diversity and inclusion in the NLP world. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 6282–6293.

9. Jumashukurov, A. (2024). The quality of translation of Turkic languages by AI translation tools. Journal of Student Research. (November 2024)

10. Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.

11. Nekoto, W., Marivate, V., Matsila, T., Fasubaa, T., Fagbohungbe, T., Akinola, S. O., … Bashir, A. (2020). Participatory research for low-resourced machine translation: A case study in African languages. Findings of EMNLP 2020, 2144–2160.

12. Pang, J., Ye, F., Wong, D. F., Yu, D., Shi, S., Tu, Z., & Wang, L. (2025). Salute the classic: Revisiting challenges of machine translation in the age of large language models. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 13, 73–95. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00730

13. Park, J. (2022). A comparative study of AI translation: Google Translate and Papago. Studies in Linguistics. (October 2022)

14. Pucinskaite, J., & Mitkov, R. (2025). Evaluating the LLM and NMT models in translating low-resourced languages. ACL Anthology.

15. Ramzan, K., Sadiq, A., & Noor, A. (2025). Comparative analysis of Google translation and human translation through the lens of Skopos theory. Journal of Applied Linguistics and TESOL (JALT), 8(1), 1938–1949.

16. Schleppegrell, M. J. (2007). The linguistic challenges of mathematics teaching and learning: A research review. Reading & Writing Quarterly. (February 2007)

17. Sergeyevna, Y. M. (2025). Overcoming linguistic challenges in translation: Strategies for success. American Journal of Philological Sciences. (April 2025)

18. Venuti, L. (1995). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge.

19. Zhang, F. (2025). A comparative analysis of human translation and AI translation in humorous subtitles: A case study of Her Story. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media. (August 2025)

20. Zhong, T., et al. (2025). Opportunities and challenges of large language models for low-resource languages in humanities research.

NMT and LLM

21. Google. (2024). Google Translate. Google LLC. https://translate.google.com

22. Google DeepMind. (2023). Gemini: A family of highly capable multimodal models. Google DeepMind. https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini

23. OpenAI. (2023). GPT-4 technical report. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774

24. Yandex. (2024). Yandex Translate. Yandex LLC. https://translate.yandex.com

Published

2026-04-22

Most read articles by the same author(s)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 > >>