Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Albert Vermes: On the translation of proper names

criterion for proper names, otherwise they would be nothing more than shorthand descriptions and would consequently lose their pragmatic convenience in enabling us to avoid having to provide a precise description of the characteristics of the object we are referring to when we do not want to. He finishes: They function not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions. The looseness of the criteria of proper names is a necessary condition for isolating the referring function from the describing function of language (Searle: 140). Thus we are now able to say that proper names are not empty marks for reference, they do not have only denotation, they may also have connotations and that theáe connotations are necessarily imprecise but nonetheless an important and inalienable part of the meaning of the proper name. To quote Searle again, the "utterance of the name communicates a proposition to the hearer" (Searle: 140). This has to be kept in mind when translating, because this will have certain consequences with regard to the decisions concerning the translation of proper names. These consequences will be examined in the next section. 3 Problems in translating proper names In this section we shall see that the fact that proper names may occasionally have connotations will pose a number of interesting and non-trivial problems to the translator, and that these problems require a lot of attention and consideration from him in order to be able to find a good solution. We shall select some typical examples from three different classes of proper names without claiming that the list is in any way complete. Let us begin with the names of persons. Four cases stand out here: 1. names of famous historical figures; 2. markers concerning the gender of the person; 3. markers of family relations; and 4. names in imaginative literature. Some famous historical personages have a constant epithet attached to their names, e.g. Richard the Lionheart

, or James the Lackland. Here the epithet is clearly a description of some characteristic of the person and is to be treated as such: it needs to be 183