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

however, that knowing the gender of the person, or knowing what sort of relationship that person has with others is more than just knowing that he or she is the referent of a certain name. In fact, it is stating something or 'communicating' something about that person: it is giving a description of some characteristic of that person. We are certainly not suggesting that this sort of information about a person is relevant in all contexts; there may, however, be cases when disregarding such information would lead to losses in the TL text. And we have not yet touched the field of imaginative literature. This is an area where the translator can really exhibit his creative abilities. The so-called telling names offer themselves as the most obvious example. Now we can return to the example given in Section 2. If somebody in a work of art has the name Flower, it well may be that it is not by pure chance, but that the author had intentionally chosen this name for that figure, because he wanted to communicate something about that character, and the translator has to consider this possibility. A very good example of this is found in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The craftsmen's names in this play all make reference to the person's profession or to his personal characteristics, or to both at the same time (Nádasdy: 38). Here the translator had to face a rather difficult problem: in some cases he had to make a choice as to which segment of the connotations in the name he should preserve. The name of Bottom, the weaver, for instance, is a double-bottomed reference to a part of the loom and to a part of the human body (with obvious connotations). In this case Nádasdy translated the name as Tompor, which makes reference to the aforementioned body part but not to the tool of the trade. The tinsmith's name, Snout, is again a simultaneous allusion to the spout of a can and to the size of the character's nose. Here the name is rendered as Lavór, which simply means washbasin. In this play, then, names are not mere tools of reference (in the technical sense of the term), they also convey information about the referents' characteristic features. In a non-imaginative text, of course, the chances for this state of affairs would obviously be far less. All this goes to show, then, that the type of text is also an important factor in making decisions about the rendering of proper names into the TL. 185