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

however, it does this at the cost of increasing the effort needed to process the linguistically more complex phrasal expression in the TL. Thus it would appear that what is gained at the one end is lost at the other. The only obvious justification for this move would be if it was difficult for a Hungarian reader to evoke from encyclopaedic memory, as part of the context, that Russia was one of the major scenes in the Second World War, which it is not. Eventually, we could resort for a possible explanation to the idea that translation is also to a large extent a matter of personal taste: when two alternatives seem to be identical in efficiency the translator will make the decision on the basis of her personal preferences. Among the institutional names we see two different cases. In the one an acronym is turned into the full expression: AP becomes Associated Press in the TL, UP is changed into United Press, and the Ilium Y.M.C.A. into iliumi Keresztény Ifjak Egyesülete. The reason in all the three instances is the same: the acronym has no meaning whatsoever in the TL and would consequently make the processing unbearably costly if left unchanged. The explication in the third example is rather self-evident but how could the first two cases be justified? Probably the translator thought the full name is more likely to "ring the bell" in the TL reader than the acronym, that is, it would put the reader to less processing effort. However, there seems to be a better solution to this problem, which is applied in the following three examples: Holiday Inn is rendered as Holiday Inn-szálló, Harvard as Harvard egyetem, and Holt, Reinhart and Wilson as Holt, Reinhart és Wilson kiadó. Here, for reasons of cultural differences, the SL expression does not give rise to the same encyclopaedic assumptions in the TL as in the SL and therefore this part of the context needs to be explicated in the logical entry of the TL name. The procedure is similar to what happened to Russia, explained in the previous paragraph, the difference being that here the explications seem to be better motivated than in the Russia-example. Exactly the same takes place in the case of the three brand names, the temporal expression Gay Nineties, in the case of Georgian and Ferris wheel in the other names group, and one of the titles, the Ilium News Leader. The other title, Gideon Bible is similar in that it contains encyclopaedic information not available in the TL, but here the explication of this content would have been very costly since it should have included an explanation of what the Gideon Society was and therefore the translator decided to cancel this part. This results in the loss of some encyclopaedic assumptions but, since these are not essential for processing the utterance in which the name occurs, this loss is not fatal and is completely justifiable. We still have one nationality name to discuss and one in the other names group. The British is rendered in the translation as angolok (the English), 172