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

though you may not know that person, that such a nice name must belong to a nice woman too. (Or, as was pointed out to me, that her parents must have belonged to the flower-power generation of the 60's.) In this example, then, the mentioning of the name has invited some expectation on your part as to the personality of the bearer of that name (or to the personality of her parents, for that matter). In other words, it has evoked certain connotations. You might argue that the proper name 'Flower' coincides in form with the common name 'flower' and it is only by virtue of this coincidence that the proper name has a 'meaning

1. Let us not go further with the example now; we will return to it later in Section 3. Nevertheless, the example shows that the question posed as the heading for this section may not be as simple as it first seemed. It may not be enough to say that proper names simply denote a person or an object, or that they refer to, or identify, that person or object without having anything else to do with it. In order to be able to answer this question we must first have a look at the other types of referring expressions that are used to identify objects in the world around us. As we read in Strawson, The language contains expressions of several celebrated kinds which are peculiarly well adapted, in different ways, for use with this [identifying] purpose. These include proper names, definite and possessive and demonstrative descriptions, demonstrative and personal pronouns (Strawson: 88). We can thus distinguish three classes of such expressions: proper names, identifying descriptions

, and pronouns. As to this latter class, it contains grammatical words, which are clearly only tools for referring and thus bear no relevance to the problem. But what can be said about identifying descriptions and proper names? To be more precise, what is the relationship of these two classes of expressions? If we can establish that proper names are in some way similar to identifying descriptions, this will prove that they do not merely refer to, but also provide some sort of description about the referent, which 181