Ritual Performativity and Functional Equivalence in Three English Translations of the Nikah Scene in Abdulla Qodiriy's O'tkan Kunlar

This article examines how three published English translations of Abdulla Qodiriy’s foundational Uzbek novel O’tkan kunlar (1922–1925) render the nikah (Islamic marriage-contract) scene that unites Otabek and Kumush. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s and John Searle’s speech-act theory, Catherine Bell’s theory of ritualization, and Eugene Nida’s concept of functional equivalence, the article argues that the nikah episode is not merely a piece of ethnographic local color but a sequence of performative utterances whose felicity depends on procedural roles (the officiating domla, the marriage proxies or vakil), a conventional triple-interrogation structure, and a collective ratifying response (“omin”). Comparing the strategies used by Carol Ermakova (2018), Mark Edward Reese (2019), and the Tashkent-based translator team of I. Tukhtasinov, O. Muminov and A. Khamidov (2017), the article shows that formal fidelity to lexical items does not guarantee that the illocutionary force and communal uptake of the ritual survive translation, and that functional equivalence in Nida’s sense requires attention to performativity as a structural, not merely lexical, phenomenon.