Naming The Hierarchy: Translating Nicknames And Titles Of Rank In "Shaytanat" And "The Godfather"

Abstract

Before a single line of dialogue is spoken, a criminal novel has usually already told its reader who outranks whom — through names. This paper narrows in on exactly that mechanism: how nicknames and titles establish and signal hierarchy within the criminal world of Tohir Malik's "Shaytanat" and Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," and what happens to that hierarchy once a translator gets involved. Malik's characters carry laqab — nicknames built from appearance, temperament, or deed — while Puzo's carry structural titles such as "Don," "consigliere," and "caporegime" that name a specific position within an organizational chart rather than a personal trait. The paper argues that this difference in kind, not just in vocabulary, is the real translation obstacle: a laqab must be read and decoded by the audience to reveal rank, while a title like "caporegime" announces rank directly, requiring no decoding at all. Rendering personality-based nicknames into English therefore demands a different toolkit than rendering position-based titles into Uzbek, and the paper works through what each direction actually requires in practice.