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

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.