Two Peoples, One Wisdom: Common and Distinctive Features in Korean and Uzbek Proverbs

When Korean and Uzbek proverbs express similar ethical meanings through different images, translators face a practical conflict between preserving semantic equivalence and retaining cultural specificity. This study aims to identify shared moral concepts and culture-bound imagery in the two proverbial traditions through systematic comparison. The analysis combines historical-comparative analysis, source criticism, semiotic analysis, and Mayring's qualitative content analysis; the proverbs were coded according to theme, imagery, ethical conclusion, and communicative function. Source-critical comparison first isolated parallel meanings and then distinguished them from culture-specific signs. The category matrix showed that both traditions address labor, patience, caution, mutual assistance, and awareness of consequences. At the same time, Korean proverbs more visibly foreground images associated with social relations and collective order, whereas Uzbek proverbs more often draw on kinship, everyday life, and practical experience. These findings indicate that shared wisdom cannot be reduced to literal verbal correspondence because the symbolic function of an image also forms part of translational equivalence. The study's scholarly contribution is a category-based interpretive model that separates proverbial meaning into the levels of a "shared ethical code" and a "culture-specific image." The model offers a theoretical basis for evaluating equivalence in intercultural communication while preserving symbolic distinctiveness. It also clarifies why a formally close translation may remain functionally inadequate when it transfers the moral proposition but removes the cultural associations carried by the original image. The proposed framework therefore links comparative paremiology with translation-oriented interpretation and provides a structured vocabulary for discussing similarity, difference, and symbolic meaning.