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

LOGICAL ENTRY TRANSFER SUBST. TRANSL. MOD. TOTAL EMPTY 108 54 0 12 174 FILLED-IN 22 65 56 11 154 Table 1: Primary numerical findings What needs some further consideration is, on the one hand, the relatively high number of transferred items in the group with filled-in logical entries and, on the other hand, the causes for the modification of 12 and 11 items in the two groups, respectively, since modification apparently does not depend solely on the presence or absence of a filled-in logical entry. Among the 22 transferred cases in the second group we find 10 personal names. Of these, some (like Stephen Crane) belong to real persons and would not therefore be normally translated in the target culture (Hungarian). Among the others, belonging to fictitious persons, we can distinguish between those, like Resi North, that have no obvious connotations in the context of the story and those, like Billy Pilgrim, with rather obvious connotations evoked in the given context from the encyclopaedic entry of the expression. What seems surprising, then, is that the names in this latter subgroup are transferred and not translated (or modified), since these are telling names in the most apparent manner: Billy Pilgrim really is making a pilgrimage in the story through time and space, Montana Wildhack is a porno star, and Roland Weary really is a nuisance to everybody around him. The translator's decision not to translate these names can be explained in the following way. Vonnegut creates his unique artistic world by mixing real and imaginary events and persons. In the context of the story (in this particular fictitious world), however, all the persons are thought of as real. Therefore, translating a name like Billy Pilgrim as Zarándok Billy, for instance, would be inconsistent with the practice of transferring the great majority of the other personal names and would probably cause an unwarranted increase of processing effort that would not be justified by the achieved contextual effect, which is rendering more perspicuous by the name the role of the character in the story. We could argue in a similar way in the case of Eliot Rosewater and Kilgore Trout, adding that the possibility of a desired measure of contextual effects is lessened further by the fact that these characters play no significant role in the book. Moreover, they also appear in other novels by Kurt Vonnegut, in the Hungarian translations of which their names are transferred and thus translating them here would be inconsistent with the general translation practice in this extended fictitious 170