Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Albert Vermes: Proper names in translation: a case study

VERMES ALBERT PROPER NAMES IN TRANSLATION: A CASE STUDY Abstract: This study is an attempt at explaining the treatment of proper names in the Hungarian translation of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The analysis is carried out in a relevance-theoretic framework, based on the assumption that translation is a special form of communication, aimed at establishing interpretive resemblance between the source text and the target text (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1986, and Gutt 1991). The findings seem to confirm the view that proper names behave in a predictable way in translation: the particular operations chosen to deal with them are, to a great extent, a function of the semantic contents they are loaded with in the given context. 1 Introduction In an earlier paper (Vermes 1996) I found that the translation of proper names is not a simple process of transference, as some authors, for instance Vendler (1975) suggested on the assumption that proper names lack meaning. The fallacy of this view lies in the faulty nature of the background assumption: not all proper names are mere identifying labels - in fact, most of them tum out to carry meaning of one sort or another. Then, of course, we need to carefully consider the contextual implications of these meanings before we can decide how best to render the name in the target language (TL). I offered three operations for this purpose: transference, translation and modification. Here, for reasons that I will explain in a moment, I want to refine this a little by distinguishing one further operation which was left implicit earlier as a subcase, partly, of translation and, partly, of modification: substitution. By this term I will refer to those cases when the source language (SL) name has a conventional correspondent in the TL, which replaces the SL item in the translation. As we will see, this is true of a large number of geographical names, for example. In this case the translator (in an ordinary translation situation) is more or less obliged to use this correspondent in the translation (Hungarian Anglia for English England). 161